"... There are already two pretenders in the field. (l) The Marquis Aladro alleges descent from the family of Scanderbeg. He is a Spaniard of some diplomatic experience, wealthy and somewhat advanced in years. When invited by a representative Albanian to submit proofs of his descent from Scanderbeg, he replied that he had no sympathy with that sort of "Byzantiuism." The fact seems to be that the last male descendant of George Castriot was killed at Pavia. The Marquis Aladro can hardly be considered a serious candidate. His knowledge of Balkan conditions may be gauged by an offer which he once made to found an opera-house at Scutari ! (2) The second claimant is a certain Prince Albert Ghica, who comes of a family of Albanian origin, long resident in Roumania. It has given Hospodars (Governors) to the old Wallachian provinces and diplomats to the modern kingdom, and enjoys princely rank in the Austrian Empire. Prince Albert is a comparatively young man with plausible manners and a dubious past, who speaks fluent French, and knows neither one word of the Albanian language nor the elements of Albanian geography. He has been chosen honorary president by one of the numerous clubs of Albanian immigrants in Bucharest, and on the strength of this social honour poses in European hotels as the chief-elect of the Albanian people. He talks of venturing in person into Albania and raising the flag of revolt. We shall see.

His claim is interesting, only in so far as his programme contemplates a union of the Vlach and Albanian causes. He asserts, probably without any basis, in fact, that he has the support of the Conservative party in Roumania, and may therefore be backed by the Roumanian propaganda in Macedonia and Albania. His modest dream is a VLACHO-ALBANIAN STATE embracing all the five vilayets of Albania and Macedonia. But the Vlachs are neither numerous nor warlike nor unanimous, and they are much too cautious to rise in support of such a chimera as this. As for the Albanian chieftains, one does not see them accepting the leadership of a denationalised adventurer from Bucharest. The Khedivial family of Egypt might, if it possessed a cadet of character and parts, prefer a claim with some measure of reason, inasmuch as Mehemet Ali, the founder of the House, was an Albanian soldier of fortune. But no member of this family has so far shown any practical interest in Albania, or done anything to assist the national propaganda. On the whole it would be best to seek a Prince from some reigning family of Europe. He must not be a Slav, since the prejudice of the Albanians against all Slavs is quite ineradicable. It would be well that he should not be a Catholic, since he will have so many Orthodox subjects who have been taught to regard the Latins as worse than the Turks. A Protestant would probably be the most generally acceptable candidate....."

Wednesday, 20 September 2006

If the nomad pastoral Vlach has a bad name, the carrier (Kiradji) Vlach is a synonym for honesty. Their wandering habits, their international distribution, seemed to mark them out for this trade. Little by little, as they developed it, their mountain-nests, apt sites for sheep-cotes, became commercial centres, and it is no, small proof of their mercantile genius that Klissoura, for example, perched on the precipitous slope of a weary mountain, its streets mere ladders cut in the rock, the roads that approach it so many toilsome spirals, should have become a place of shops and bazaars, with two market-days in the week. The railways, I fancy, have somewhat diminished the trade of the carrier Vlachs. The older men of Kruchevo and Klissoura remember the days when a caravan went twice a year from their village to Vienna and brought back with it all that Macedonia needed from the West. But these were the days before Baron Hirsch had bribed Constantinople to allow him to build his railway. Now Klissoura has something of the air of a decayed town, which dreams amid its daily mists and infrequent suns of a glory that is departed. Half its houses are empty, and their architecture, solid, roomy, and with some incipient tendency to ornament, speaks of a greater trade than any that survives. Its comfortable shopkeepers, seated at ease on their heaps of cushions within the stout walls that defy the incessant rains of the mountain-top, will tell you that when they were boys Klissoura was the second city of Macedonia, hardly distanced by Salonica. In those great days there were even families which had pianos and German governesses ! Pisodéri had a more romantic history of a great past. It is a modern village enough on its present site, for it dates only from the second decade of last century, when its ancestors, fleeing from the tyranny of Ali Pasha, found a refuge among these arid and inaccessible rocks which no cupidity would envy. Ask the average Vlach why his people have perched their homes in these undesirable sites, and he will answer, with a frankness which is eloquent of Balkan conditions, "Why, of course

178

from fear." "Apo Phovon" is the monotonous response to so many questions in Macedonia. "The coneys are a feeble folk, but they have their dwellings among the rocks." The people of Pisodéri came from Moschopolis, one of those semi-independent and relatively civilised Christian communities of Albania which preserved a Hellenic culture among the Highlands until Ali Pasha crushed them. Moschopolis was ruined, but its inhabitants escaped with their lives. Half of them settled at Pisodéri; the other half fled as far north as Prizrend, where to this day they still preserve their identity and their traditions. Moschopolis was an eager centre of that stirring of ideas which preceded the Greek insurrection. It became a nest of culture when the learned Greeks of Constantinople found a refuge in it after the capture of their city by the Turks. It had in its great days a population of sixty thousand or more. It boasted a famous school, a public library, and a printing-press; and among the treasures of the Vlach colony in Prizrend are still to be reckoned a little store of books which issued from it. I have seen, too, at Koritza, a stained-glass window, coloured with no contemptible art, which came from Moschopolis. Relics like these, seen in a background of empty houses and decaying streets, lead one to suspect that, despite railways and reforms, Macedonia has actually retrograded in civilisation during the past century. There are printing-offices in Salonica which issue semi-official newspapers in French for a Jewish public under Turkish censorship, and there is even a little hand-press in Monastir which can strike off visiting-cards in five or six languages. But in all Macedonia there is certainly at this moment no press which publishes books. To-day the Turk is stronger than he was in 1820, and the elaborate machinery of paralysis and strangulation which he calls a Government has organised itself with the aid of the telegraph into a penetrating and omnipresent system.

3. The Vlach Language

The origin of the Vlachs is one of those problems of Balkan ethnography which seem desperate and obscure, chiefly because the scholars who have examined them are

179

partisans with some nationalist thesis to uphold. No other Balkan race has quite so wide a distribution. They are Russian subjects in Bessarabia, Austro-Hungarians in Transylvania and Ruthenia. They form an independent kingdom under the national name of Roumania in the two Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. They are a sensible fraction of the population of Servia and Bulgaria. In Macedonia they are the backbone of the Hellenic party. In Greece itself, and particularly in Thessaly, they are numerous and influential. They are to be found also in Dalmatia and Bosnia, and under the name of Morlachs (Mavro-Vlachs, i.e., Nigri Latini) they served in the armies of the Venetian Republic. Their language, despite dialectical variations, due to the diversity of the alien influences to which it has been subjected, betrays a substantial identity. Their habits and customs are also similar, and even the Austrian Roumans were, like their Southern brethren, a pastoral people with the same shy preference for mountain dwellings. The Vlach language is as genuinely Latin as any of the Romance tongues of the West, and phonetically it has undergone in many ways a less drastic modification. But it is a Latin tongue cut off from Latin culture. While the other Romance languages have ceaselessly enriched themselves by a direct study of the parent tongue, the Vlachs have led their isolated life, drawing their culture from the Eastern Church and Greek literature. In the Northern speech of the Roumanian kingdom, it is said, the Latin words are outnumbered by borrowed words of Slavonic origin; but such a calculation conveys an erroneous impression, since the Latin words are those in most common use. The Vlach language as it is spoken in the Macedonian villages to-day is not much more than a patois for the home. Its vocabulary has lost all traces of culture. When a Vlach has occasion to use any word that involves more than the most elementary mental effort, he has recourse to Greek. If he wishes to express himself with any picturesqueness or precision he must lard his conversation with Greek adjectives. The names of modern things and of all abstractions are also

180

Greek, and unless he is an educated man he does not know the Latin alphabet.

4. History of the Vlachs

The balance of evidence goes to show that before the sixth century Macedonia had largely lost its earlier veneer of Hellenism. Amid the ceaseless inroads of the barbarians such portion of the original Thracian and Macedonian population as survived must have been that which grouped itself around the Latin-speaking military stations and colonies, and while augmenting their population adopted their idiom. During the annual raids of the barbarians, this Roman element must have been uprooted and swept hither and thither by the barbarian flood. Whole colonies of provincials were dragged about in the train of these tremendous migrations. There is, for example, one authentic instance in which a Roman colony from the cities of Southern Illyria was dragged by the Avars beyond the River Save. There it remained for seventy years, but revolted and returned across the Balkans to settle in the country inland from Salonica. [1] How far these Roman colonies were really Italian in blood is doubtful. We know, for example, that Trajan's colonies in the Danubian provinces, to which the Roumans of Roumania love to trace their origin, were drawn from every quarter of the Roman world save Italy. Originally they must have been largely composed of Syrians and Illyrians, but the official language was apparently familiar enough to impose itself not only on these mixed colonies of veterans but even on their wives, their slaves and the refugees who would probably join them. Their nomadic and pastoral habits were doubtless adopted more from necessity than choice. They could only maintain themselves against the Barbarians and the Slavs on their mountain-tops, and there a settled agricultural life was manifestly impossible. During their struggle for existence their Latin civilisation disappeared, while the Latin tongue persisted as the language of the home. It is easier to understand the success of the Vlachs in maintaining their identity when one remembers that for three hundred years

during the Middle Ages they maintained some political independence in Great Wallachia, which extended at one time not merely over Thessaly but also over the greater part of Southern Macedonia (see Chapter IV., p. 97 footnote). Their dealings at this period must have brought them into much more intimate association with the Slavs than with the Greeks. The Greek influence which has partially Hellenised the Vlachs of Macedonia to-day can hardly date from before the Turkish conquest. It is the work not of the Byzantine Empire but of the modern Church, and seems to have reached its height during the eighteenth century.

5. Women the Conservative Force in the East

The explanation of the failure of the Greeks to absorb the Vlachs of Macedonia, despite the influence of their Church, their commerce, and their schools, is to be sought, I suspect, in the position of the Oriental woman. She is the conservative force in the East, unchanging from generation to generation, simply because she is still almost totally uneducated. The men of a Vlach household may acquire an easy and even literary knowledge of Greek, and prefer to use it in their intercourse with one another. But it is only in the present generation that the women have begun to go to school, and Vlach persists because it is the language which they first teach to their children. There is, of course, nothing approaching the rigidity of the harem system among the Christian women of the East, but Turkish influence has had its part in delaying their emancipation. In some of the more savage towns of Northern Albania no Christian woman will venture into the streets without a veil as close and forbidding as any Moslem Yashmak. The Bulgarian peasant woman seems to feel herself inadequately clothed unless she has swathed her mouth and chin in the kerchief which she binds about her head. In the home her place is one of decent and timid retirement. She will not sit down at table if a stranger be present. Her place during a "call" is to hand round the jam and the raki, but she rarely joins in the conversation. She is in no sense the companion of her husband, she has no social place as the

182

hostess. [1] In the larger towns, where one might have expected the growth of something like a middle class with Europeon habits and conventions, the presence of the Turkish population perpetuates the past. The streets are thought to be no place for a respectable Christian woman. There is always a bare chance of violence and something approaching a probability of insult. The native women accordingly keep indoors as much as possible, for the outer world is for their imagination a place in which Turkish soldiers lie in wait to hurl abuse at them. It is supposed that European costume, and above all European hats excite the Turk's peculiar sense of humour and even arouse his fanaticism. I have known young ladies of the present generation who keep marvellous hats and jackets, of what is supposed to be the European fashion, in locked trunks, which they exhibit on dull afternoons to callers. But outside the shuttered house and the closed courtyard they dare to wear nothing but the traditional costumes of their race. Even in Monastir, where all the townsmen wear European clothes, and every tailor calls himself a Francoraftes, it is surprising how few of the wealthier native women venture to wear their Salonica finery. In the bazaars and

1. The position of women in the East is a subject on which one is apt to form hasty judgments. Certainly they are everywhere treated as the recognised inferiors of the men — which in nearly every respect, even in point of physical beauty, they undoubtedly are. This is more noticeable, however, in lands still under Turkish rule. During 1897, when Athens was crowded with refugees from Crete and Thessaly, who were fed at public tables, I noticed that the men and women from Thessaly sat down together, whereas the Cretan men were served first, and the women only after their lords had dined. I have often felt indignant on meeting a peasant family on its travels, the man riding, the woman afoot. But really this is due to some queer tradition of female modesty for which the men are not to blame. Two wounded girls from a village left our hospital in Ochrida, cured, but still delicate, and we provided pack-horses for them. Nothing, however, would induce them to ride, and in reply to our questions they would only say that it was "incorrect." The Bulgarian folk-songs of Macedonia prove that a delicate and quite refined sentiment may be felt by the young men during courtship. Our own peasant-ballads are not always so pretty. The Bulgarian songs also talk of the wife in a strain of familiar humour as the ruler of the house. The "subjection " of the women, which strikes a stranger most unpleasantly, is largely a matter of manners and forms.

183

even in the quasi-European shops of the main streets one meets few Christian women, excepting always the peasant women of the villages. Shopping is done by the men or by the servants of the family, and social intercourse hardly goes beyond the gossiping of neighbours. Even for European ladies it is thought scarcely respectable and scarcely safe to venture out of doors without the escort of an armed Albanian cavass — but this is no doubt due, in part, to a desire to maintain their prestige, and the men are also rarely to be seen alone. These customs and conventions, which may seem trivial enough, have in reality a profound influence on Christian society and even on Macedonian politics. Women who lead this secluded life, cut off from intercourse with any larger circle than their family and neighbours of their own sex, inevitably live in the past and conserve the past. Modern commerce, modern schools, railways, and those national movements which link the men of a Macedonian town to the free life of one or other of the emancipated states beyond the Turkish frontier, have little influence on the stagnant and secluded existence of the home. Here, for example, is one reason why, during the centuries when educated Vlachs, Albanians, and even Bulgarians imbibed Greek culture, spoke and wrote the Greek language and thought of themselves as Greeks, the women retained their own idiom and their own traditions. Had the Greeks spent the same pains on educating the women of Macedonia that they took to Hellenise the men, the whole Balkan Peninsula might have been Greek to-day. Generation by generation the children of these artificial Greeks learned at their mother's knee a native and non-Hellenic tongue. They might despise it as a patois, they might be ignorant of the very alphabet in which it should be written. But despite themselves it was in this patois that they were forced to express their most intimate thoughts, their most human emotions. It only needed an impulse from without, and the revolt of nationalism which the women had unconsciously prepared found an echo in the very fibre of their minds. Tardily the Greeks are realising their mistake. There are now secondary schools

184

for girls which are doing their best to Hellenise the Vlachs of Monastir and the Albanians of Koritza. But the social conditions of this Turk-haunted land are against the enterprise. The girls marry early and leave school early. They cannot abandon the patois of their mothers. Greek is for them the language of a distant and masculine outer world beyond the closely guarded home, and while that world is closed to them its language is a superfluity, a mere elegant accomplishment. I have seen the excellent Greek school for girls at Monastir where Vlach maidens are painfully taught to construe their Xenophon. The ludicrous mistakes of grammar which one heard in the lower forms were enough to show that the teachers were drilling these children in a foreign tongue. It is easy to taboo every word of Vlach within the schoolroom walls. But outside on the steps when Urania quarrels with Aspasia over her broken doll, she expresses her feelings in fluent and natural Vlach. And what is true of the Vlachs is equally true of the Albanians. I knew a wealthy commercial family in Koritza which showed the several strata of Hellenisation very clearly. The mother was a dignified old lady who dressed in native costume and knew no word of any language but Albanian. The sons, merchants and bankers, spoke excellent Greek, which had, however, a stilted and classical tinge that they would never have acquired in the nursery. The daughters of the house wore "skirts and blouses." They had passed through the Greek High School; but that was some years ago. To-day they know about as much of Greek as the average middle-class girl at home knows of French, and are quite as shy of venturing to express themselves in it.

6. Weakening of the Greek Connection

Twenty years ago there was nothing in Balkan politics so inevitable, so nearly axiomatic, as the connection of the Vlachs with the Greek cause. They had no national consciousness and no national ambitions. Scattered as they are, it was obviously impossible for them to dream of a Vlach nation. They were unmoved by the secession of the Bulgars — indeed, it only confirmed them in their rooted belief that the Bulgars belong to an inferior order

185

of creation. With some of them Hellenism was a passion and an enthusiasm. They believed themselves to be Greek. They baptized their children "Themistocles" and "Penelope." They studied in Athens, and they left their fortunes to found Greek schools and Greek hospitals. With the mass of the Vlachs, however, this loyalty to Greece was a more calculating and interested attachment. This sparse and furtive race is of necessity opportunist. It seeks to merge and conceal itself in some larger organisation from the same timid and unobtrusive instinct which causes it to build its villages on the mountains. So long as Greece held an undisputed primacy among the Christian peoples of the Balkan Peninsula it was obviously the interest of the Vlachs to shelter under the Greek name. She was the eldest of the independent states, she claimed the reversion of Constantinople itself, and, what is perhaps more important, she controlled the Church. And so the Vlachs attached themselves to the Greeks as the Jews attach themselves to the Turks. But the recent misfortunes of Greece have thrown some doubt on the wisdom of this connection. The war of 1897 not only exposed the Greeks of Turkey to the hostility of the Government, but it demonstrated the hopeless weakness of the Greek army. The Bulgarian Committee, on the other hand, is a real and very present force, which no prudent race of timid principles can affect to despise. Moreover, behind the Committee the Vlachs can discern the efficient Bulgarian army and the overwhelming power of Russia. They feel that the Greek idea of a revival of the Eastern Empire on a Hellenic basis is a very remote chimera indeed, and being practical politicians they are beginning to reconsider their place in the new scheme of things. The stronger force has an attraction for the Vlach mind, which sometimes finds a naïve and frank expression. "Greece has no army," as a Vlach storekeeper in Klissoura said to me, "and Roumania is very far away. Bulgaria is both near and powerful." Unwilling, on these sound if somewhat unromantic grounds, to excite the animosity of the Bulgarians, who are after all their best customers as well

186

as the masters of a dangerous secret organisation which shows little mercy to its enemies, the Vlachs have found the present Hellenic policy a very sore strain on their loyalty. It is very well for the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople and Greek Ministers in Athens to conclude an alliance with the Turks against the Bulgarian "wolves," and to exhort all the faithful to denounce and betray their Bulgarian neighbours to the Turkish authorities. But isolated Vlach villages like Pisodéri and Klissoura have after all to live among these "wolves," and they find their friendship more profitable than their vengeance. And without attributing to the Vlachs any high or chivalrous motives, which scarcely form a part of their character, they are certainly "good neighbours," whose native kindliness has not been undermined by a "cultured" devotion to political abstractions. When the Bulgarian villages round Klissoura had been burned by the Turks with the blessing of the Greek Archbishop of Castoria, and the assistance of a Greek band, the Vlachs gave the homeless refugees a welcome and a shelter, and housed nearly two thousand of them for the winter. In significant contrast was the attitude of the genuine Greek town of Castoria, which received barely a score of Bulgarian fugitives. Another Vlach village, which I will call X, was on even more intimate terms with the rebels. It had no scruple about supplying Tchakalároff's band with provisions. It had quietly armed itself, moreover, for all eventualities, and assured me that it had its five hundred rifles in a safe but convenient place. At the outset of the insurrection it even had some thoughts of joining the Bulgarians. But with true Vlach caution it waited to see how matters would go. If the rising had promised success, then, for all its Greek school, its Greek priests and its Philhellenic traditions, it would have joined the stronger side. But not all the Vlachs temporised. Sixty young men from a group of Vlach villages near Monastir actually joined the bands. Others from Florina and Monastir swelled their ranks, and while the Greek officers in Athens were offering their swords to the Sultan, these lads were marching against

the Turks to the rhythm of a Greek war-song. But despite this Vlach legion, and the fact that the Vlach, Pitou Goulé, who led the Kruchevo bands, and one of Tchakalároff's most trusted lieutenants, Mitri Vlacho, did their best to rouse their kinsmen, it would be a mistake to suppose that any great number of them joined the Bulgarians openly. That will happen only when the Bulgarians are on the eve of victory.

7. The Roumanian Propaganda

From another quarter the Greek connection is seriously threatened. Thirty years ago a clever Hellenised Vlach of Monastir, Apostolo Margariti, once a teacher in a Greek school, invented the Roumanian propaganda in Macedonia. Servia and Bulgaria and Greece each had their foothold in Macedonia. By standing aloof Roumania virtually renounced her position as a Balkan State. Doubtless the Vlachs are nowhere in a majority, and Roumania can never hope for the reversion of any portion of Macedonian territory. But in these poor relations, a kindred people speaking the same tongue, she obviously has the means of making her influence felt. Could she but detach the Vlachs from their allegiance to Greece, she would have at once her pieces in the game. Should she wish to acquire the friendship of Bulgaria, she could throw the Vlachs into the balance on the Bulgarian side, and demand her price for the favour in any re-arrangement of territory — the Bulgarian district of Silistria, for example. Should she be on bad terms with her Bulgarian neighbour, she can coquet with Greece, talk of the common interest of the Greek and "Latin" races of the Balkans in opposing the common barbarian enemy, and forthwith direct the Vlachs to assist their old allies once more. Indeed, the situation seemed to lend itself to endless combinations, any one of them fruitful of advantage. [1] The Vlachs are, in a sense, the pivot of the Macedonian question. They are not numerous in comparison with the Bulgarians, or even with the Albanians. But without them the Greeks would cut a sorry figure. North of Castoria there is not so much as a single Greek village.

It is only the Vlachs who give Hellenism a foothold. Withdraw them from their Greek alliance, and Greece must disappear from Macedonia. Group them with the Bulgarians, and the Slav supremacy will be unquestioned and unchallenged. This reasoning appealed to Roumania, and Margariti obtained the funds he demanded. Roumanian schools were opened in all the more important Vlach centres. Villages were bribed to declare themselves Roumanian, and priests here and there began to say Mass in Roumanian. The Turks were delighted. It meant one rift the more among the Christians. The Greeks naturally fought the new movement with their familiar weapons. No calumny was too gross for poor Margariti himself, and probably he was no better than the average Levantine adventurer. The Patriarch showed himself, as usual, more Greek than Christian. The idea of nominating a Vlach Bishop was scouted, and the few priests who dared to say Mass in Roumanian were promptly excommunicated. For a generation the movement made little progress. The schools had more teachers than pupils, and every pupil had to be paid to learn. None of the larger and wealthier Vlach villages abandoned Hellenism, and for a time it seemed that the Greeks could afford to laugh.

But within the past two or three years a change has become apparent. The strain of the Greek connection will bear no more, for Greece is too clearly a weak protector. Roumania has redoubled her efforts. She now votes 600,000 francs annually for the propaganda — a sum which will buy many adherents. She has opened a Consulate as far south as Jannina. The consul at Monastir has won the ear of Hilmi Pasha, who sees the policy of weakening the Greeks. Through the consul's influence any Vlach of moderate parts can be sure of obtaining a Government appointment, and there could be no more powerful bribe than that. Village after village has accepted a Roumanian school, and only the wealthier centres hold out.

In May, 1905, the Vlach question came to a crisis. The Vali of Jannina, who was under Greek influence, did violence to the sanctity of the Roumanian Consulate and

to the persons of some Roumanian school inspectors. A violent diplomatic conflict followed, which ended in a complete victory for Roumania. But indeed it suited Turkish policy to yield. The Vlachs are now formally organised as a separate nationality (Millet), with the right to possess officially recognised schools and churches of its own. From the Turkish standpoint this can only tend to weaken the Christians. The Greek Patriarchate protested, as it always has done wherever a Balkan race has won the right to worship in its own tongue. The only result was to drive the Vlachs towards the Exarchist fold. They know that the Bulgarians will respect their language and their racial identity — the Bulgarians are not Imperialists. The murderous violence of the Greek bands has done the rest, and the Vlachs, too weak to stand alone, are now the allies of the Bulgarians.

8. Feud with the Greeks

For some years to come, Greece and Roumania are likely to continue their battle for the possession of the Vlach villages. [1] The conflict rages mainly around the Church — like all conflicts in the Balkans — and both sides show a ghoulish tendency to make the graveyard their chosen battle-ground. No Vlach can die in Monastir without a free fight between pro-Greeks and pro-Roumanians as to which language shall be used to dedicate his soul to God. Greeks and Catholics never fought with more ardour for the keys of the Holy Sepulchre than do Greeks and Roumanians for the corpse of a dead Vlach. An extract from an official Greek publication [2] gives a lively idea of one of these encounters :—

"A Vlach belonging to the Greek-Orthodox Church having died at Monastir, his brother, who had been won over to the Roumanian propaganda by methods familiar to us all, actually dared to form the project of having him buried by a Roumanian priest not recognised by the Patriarch, and to refuse the (Greek) Bishop of Pelagonia entry into the mortuary.

"These proceedings aroused the liveliest irritation among the Greek-Orthodox population of Monastir and among the friends of the dead man. There was clearly an intention to create a prece-

1. For the later developments of this feud, see Chapter. VII., p. 218, note.

2.Bulletin d'Orient, Athens, July I, 1904.

190

dent which would soon permit the Roumanian propaganda to have its own priests, and to build a church at Monastir, in defiance of the canons of the Orthodox Church and of the clearly expressed will of the Vlach population. Moreover, the suspicions of the public were confirmed by the fact that the said propaganda is building a house which has a strange resemblance to a chapel.

"The Greek Bishop having fulfilled his duty, which was to forbid the celebration of the funeral rites by an unrecognised priest, the Turkish authorities had the body embalmed, and announced that the burial must be postponed until the arrival of instructions from Constantinople.

"But in spite of this declaration they decided shortly afterwards to have the dead man buried by the Roumanian priest. At this news the exasperated populace went to the mortuary, unharnessed the hearse, assaulted Pinetta, the notorious son-in-law of Apostolo Margariti, with several other prominent pro-Roumanians, and refused to obey the armed force which summoned it to disperse. The whole town was in disturbance, and the market was closed for three hours.

"The Vali, greatly impressed by the decided attitude of the Greeks, whom two charges of cavalry had failed to disperse (?), telegraphed directly to the Sultan to lay before him the gravity of the situation, and to ask for instructions. In reply he received the order to surrender the corpse neither to the Greeks nor the pro-Roumanians, and to entrust the local authorities with the burial."

This glorious victory for Greece is a significant commentary both on the habits of the Greek mind and the methods of the Turkish Government. These Thermopylaes of the mortuary are the triumphs to which modern Hellenism aspires. Every detail is a satire in itself — the inability of the local authorities to bury a corpse without consulting Constantinople; that delicious touch of the embalming of the poor body while Constantinople tardily replies; the final appeal to the Sultan himself, and the rough justice of the decision that since the Christians were quarrelling, the body must have a secular burial. Nothing could be more Turkish, and nothing could be more Greek.

Tuesday, 19 September 2006

These two communities have frequently been treated by scholars in unity because of: their Roman languages (which most linguists regard as Romanian dialects, although some experts assume the Aroumanian to be a separate language), their confusion in the historical sources and official public statistics and records, and their common institutions (schools and the like) established during different periods in Bulgaria. Whenever statistics refer to a Romanian speaking population without any differentiation, it should be taken into account that Romanian /Wallachian/ is the language spoken by some of the Gypsy people in Bulgaria. Nowadays, again, the two communities are represented by a single organization and publish a newspaper in common.

The theories of the origins of the two communities are numerous and contradictory with advocates of mutually exclusive assumptions being found even among their own ranks. Some scholars think that Aroumanians are descendants of Roman colonists, others that they come from certain native Thracian tribes, still others refer to Romanized Hellenes. Aroumanian colonies are found in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Macedonia. (Recently the Council of Europe approved a document appealing for the preservation of the language and culture of the Aroumanians.) A long existing intra-community division comprises the groups of "urban Aroumanians", also called Tsintsars, and the nomadic shepherds.

Wallachian (Wallach, Vlach) population is to be found in the Serbian and Bulgarian regions along the Danube. According to one of the theories, this population consists of Romanian peasants who had migrated from the lands on the other side of the Danube in consequence of Ciocoi /big landlords/ oppression. Some other theories assert that Vlachs are the offspring of Bulgarian émigré families having re-emigrated from Romania for the same reason. It could be that the truth is somewhere in between. Both communities are Eastern Orthodox Christians.

At the turn of the 19th century, trade relations between the Austrian-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empire became more intensive. On the other hand, the southern Albanian lands, where the Aroumanians had settled, were caught up in anarchy and Christian Aroumanians were continuously harassed by Muslim Albanians. The Aroumanian residents of the ruined towns - Moskopolje, Linotipi, etc., were scattered around in Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, while Aroumanian shepherds migrated from the areas of the Gramoz Mountain and Pindus range in northern Greece. During the same period, Wallachians were also migrating from Romania - some of them fleeing from oppression by the big landlords (the Ottoman administration encouraged the settlement of the depopulated territories along the Danube), others were escaping from conscription introduced in the Principality of Wallachia. Aroumanian colonies were established in the towns of Peshtera, Plovdiv, Assenovgrad, Doupnitsa, Gorna Dzhumaya (modern Blagoevgrad), Sofia, etc. Wallachians settled along the Timok valley, near the towns of Vidin and Kula. There are records of clashes between ethnic Bulgarian and Aroumanian urban dwellers during the period of the Bulgarian national revival. The reason is that in the times of struggle for an independent Bulgarian Church the Aroumanian urban dwellers, as subjects of Greek schooling, were pro-Greek minded. After the Liberation, however, the number of Aroumanians grew up. Many of them, driven by their Orthodox Christian religion and by some other factors, preferred to live in Bulgaria rather than where they the had lived before, in Macedonia, which remained within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. The migrants of the new wave were no longer of pro-Greek orientation, but rather more closely tied with the Romanian culture. At the same time, they were much more receptive with respect to Bulgarian culture. Meanwhile, with the birth of new states on the Peninsula, many of the Aroumanian shepherds had to adopt a settled mode of living. Wallachians, the majority of whom are to this day characterized by a sense of relatedness to the Bulgarian lands, were actively involved in Bulgaria's political life and in large numbers participated in the wars waged by Bulgaria. The situation changed after 1918. On the one side, at that time Romania began an active propaganda among the Aroumanians and Vlachs, and, on the other, the successive Bulgarian administrations undertook actions of repression against them, although sporadically or within occasional campaigns. Romanian schools were open in the 1920's - mainly in Gorna Dzhumaya, while the school in Sofia gradually grew into a Romanian Institute and a lyceum. In 1923, a Romanian church was consecrated in Sofia, where Romanian priests conducted the services. (This church, which is under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Romania, is still operative.) Aroumanians in the town of Gorna Dzhumaya have had a church of their own since 1906. Initially, the college and the church were in service of the Aroumanian community alone, but from 1933 on the lyceum began to admit students from among the Wallachians of the Danubian regions. The school functioned until 1948, when it was closed and the Aroumanian organizations were disbanded. In the 1930's, the Romanian universities would admit students, and provide fellowships to them, from the Wallachian population living by the Danube. There was also propaganda work encouraging migration to Romania. It was more effective among the Aroumanians, while only some 200 Vlach families left to live there. (On the one hand, Vlachs had no economic motivation to emigrate, on the other, we already mentioned their affiliation to the Bulgarian society.) After the coup in 1923, the leaders of the Wallachian movement persecuted by the new Bulgarian government emigrated to Romania, where they, together with Wallachian immigrants from Serbia, founded their associations and published their own newspapers.

Under the Communist regime, except for the overall policy of assimilation, there is no written evidence of some special measures aimed at the two ethnic communities or of some specific ban on the use of their language. This was due perhaps to the circumstance that Romania was also under Communist rule, as well as to the fact that a numerous Bulgarian ethnic minority lived there.

In 1991, an Association of Vlachs in Bulgaria was founded. Its membership includes both Vlachs and Aroumanians, the two communities maintaining the autonomy of their associations. They publish in Vidin one common newspaper Timpul /Time/ and the Aroumanian society issues a Bulletin, Armani, in Sofia. The Association sends to Romania young people to study at the universities there. (Similarly, through the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science, and with the help of the Bulgarian ethnic organizations in Romania, ethnic Bulgarians from Romania are admitted to the institutions of higher education in Bulgaria.) The association is a member of international minority organizations. It organizes folk festivals, maintains regular contacts with the Bulgarian and Romanian authorities, with non-governmental organizations, as well as with the organizations of the ethnic Bulgarians in Romania. Since several years, steps have been made to re-open the Romanian school in Sofia.

It is no chance that no figures have been mentioned so far. The reason is that statistical data are quite contradictory. According to the 1910 census, 1843 individuals have identified themselves using the ethnic names by which Aroumanians were referred to at that time, Tsintsars and Kutzovlachs. The same census, however, reports 80 000 Romanians and a total of 96 502 people whose mother tongue was Romanian. In 1920, when Bulgarian territories, populated among other people by Vlachs, were ceded to Romania and Serbia, a "Romanian" identity was reported by 57 312 persons, and the people whose mother tongue was Romanian numbered 75 065 of whom 10 648 Aroumanians. In 1926 the number of "Romanians" living in Bulgaria was 69 080, while the total number of individuals whose mother tongue was Romanian ran up to 83 746. The Aroumanins belonging to this group were divided, according to their self-descriptions, into three subgroups: 5000 Aroumanians, 4000 Kutzovlachs and 1500 Tsintsars. In the next census, which was conducted in the years after the 1934 coup, the number of all minority groups was deliberately reduced for political reasons. Numbers varied not only as a result of immigration, internal migratory movements and natural growth, but also as a result of varying self-identification of the same persons in the different censuses. Nevertheless, in 1992 as many as 5195 people declared themselves to be Vlachs and 2 491 Romanians, or 7 650 people in all. It should be added that these figures might include Roma people too. It is also likely for Vlachs and Aroumanians to have been placed under the title "others" because of their differing self-reported identity. The discrepancy with pre-war numbers is due mainly to the fact that most of the Wallachs, although they have kept their language and folk customs, prefer to identify themselves as Bulgarians.

This is what Encyclopaedia Britannica says about this ethnic group:

The Vlachs. In central and southern Thessaly, the Vlachs played an important role. They have generally been identified with the indigenous, pre-Slav populations of Dacian and Thracian origin, many of whom migrated into the less-accessible mountainous areas of Greece and the northern Balkan region because of the Germanic and Avar-Slav invasions and immigration of the 5th-7th centuries. The Vlachs maintained a transhumant, pastoral economy in those areas. Their language belongs to the so-called Macedo-Romanian group and is closely related to that known from the 13th century on as Romanian (Daco-Romanian); it is essentially rooted in the late Latin, heavily influenced by the Slavic dialects with which the Daco-Thracian populations were in regular contact. By the 11th century the Vlachs are described as communities of shepherds who moved with their flocks between their winter pastures in Thessaly and summer pastures of the Gramoz Mountain and Pindus range; they are found in Byzantine armies and are mentioned in many documents dealing with landholdings in northern Greece, where--as is often the case in relations between settled and nomadic populations- - they were regarded as troublemakers and thieves. Byzantines were often imprecise in their use of ethnic names; the Vlachs seem frequently to have been confused with the Bulgarians, through whose territory they also wandered on their seasonal routes and pasturage. A major modern debate about the role of the Vlachs in the establishment of the Second Bulgarian empire after 1185 continues.

Tuesday, 19 September 2006

Although there are many recorded cases of Catholics being converted to Orthodoxy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bosnia, it is clear that this spread of the Orthodox Church did not happen by conversion alone. In the areas where Orthodoxy made its most striking gains, especially in northern Bosnia, the same period saw a large influx of settlers from Orthodox lands. It was evidently deliberate policy on the part of the Ottomans to fill up territory which had been depopulated, either by war or by plague. There are signs in the earliest defters (Turkish tax records) of groups of Christian herdsman, identifiable as Vlachs, being settled in devasted areas of eastern Hercegovinia.

In the defters of the 1470s and 1480s they can be seen spreading into central and north-central Bosnia, in the regions round Visoko and Maglaj: soon after 1476, for example, roughly 800 Vlach families were settled in the Maglaj district, accompanied by two Orthodox priests. The number of Vlachs in north-central and north-east Bosnia continued to grow over the next fifty years, and they began to spread into north-west Bosnia too.

During the wars of the early sixteenth century more areas of northern Bosnia became depopulated as Catholics fled into Hapsburg territory. Since it was particularly important for the Ottomans not to leave land empty close to the military border, there were large new influxes of Vlach settlers from Hercegovina and Serbia. Further movements into this area took place throughout the sixteenth century; plague, as well as war, left demographic gaps which needed to be filled.

As early as 1530, when the Habsburg official Benedict Kuripe?ic travelled through Bosnia, he was able to report that the country was inhabited by three peoples, One was the Turks, who ruled "with great tyranny" over the Christians. Another was "the old Bosnians, who are of the Roman Catholic faith." And the third were "Serbs, who call themselves Vlachs . . . They came from Smederovo and Belgrade." So important was the Vlach element in the creation of this Bosnian Orthodox population that, three centuries later, the term "Vlach" was still being used in Bosnia to mean "member of the Orthodox Church."

Of course, non-Vlach Serbians and Hercegovinans also took part in this process of settlement. The problem of distinguishing them, and of saying what the term "Vlach" meant during this period, will be discussed below. But it is clear that Vlachs, as a distinctive ethnic and cultural group, played a major role. The Vlachs were particularly suitable for the Ottoman government's purposes, not only because they were mobile (their typical occupations were shepherding, horse-breeding and organizing transport for traders), but also because they had a strong military tradition. Special arrangements were made to induce them to move to the Ottoman-Habsburg border: the tax on sheep was reduced for those living in the border region, and their leaders were granted large timars (land holdings). Although they received no military salary, they were entitled to carry arms and expected to fulfil a military role; in place of a salary, they were permitted to plunder enemy territory. Known by the terms "martolos" or "vojnuk", they became the most feared element in the Ottoman military machine.

At the same time, Vlachs and Serbs who had fled northwards from the Ottoman advance in the fifteenth century, and who had similar military traditions, began to be organized by the Habsburgs on the other side of this fluid and shifting border. Vlachs from inside Bosnia also crossed the border to join them; the three reasons given by Benedict Kuripesic for the depopulation of Bosnia in the early sixteenth century were plague, the devshirme (collection of male Christian children), and the flight of the Serb-Vlach martolosi across the border. In 1527, after his election as King of Hungary and Croatia, Ferdinand I of Austria established a formal system of land-holdings and military duties for them. They were free of feudal obligations, permitted a share of booty, allowed to elect their own captains (vojvode) and magistrates (knezovi), and free to practise Orthodox Christianity. In this way, a special system of land tenure and military organization grew up under the Habsburgs, the so-called Militargrenze or vojna krajina (military border), which was eventually to involve a strip of territory twenty to sixty miles wide and a thousand miles long. The borderers or Grenzer on the north and north-western frontier of Bosnia, equally renowned for their military prowess and ferocity, were known as "Vlachs" or "Morlachs", and in 1630 their privileges were re-established by Ferdinand II in a document known as the "Law of the Vlachs" -- "Statuta Valachorum". Apart from the big set-piece compaigns, the military struggle between Ottoman and Habsburg on this border consisted mainly, year in, year out, of Vlachs fighting Vlachs.

Who were the Vlachs, and where, originally, did they come from? This is one of the most vexed questions in Balkan history. Vlachs are found today scattered over many parts of the Balkans; the biggest concentration is in the Pindus mountains of northern Greece, but there are also Vlachs in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania and Serbia, as well as the remnants of a Vlach population in the Istrian peninsula. Tradtionally they were herdsmen and shepherds practising a form of semi-nomadism called transhumance, in which flocks are moved, sometimes over great distances, between a regular summer pasture in the mountains and a regular winter pasture elsewhere. Some grew rich from the products of their pastoral life: wool, cheese and livestock. Many also became well known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as merchants and international traders.

These occupations have changed very little over the centuries; one twelfth-century Byzantine poem refers to Vlach cheese, which was famous in Constantinople, and to a Vlach cloak, the large black sleeveless cape (talagan or tambari) which can still be seen on the shoulders of Balkan shepherds. Other Byzantine writers refer to to the transhumance of the Vlachs, and medieval Serbian documents refer to them as shepherds and kjelatori -- a version of the Latin calator, "packhorse-leader", surviving in modern Vlach as calator, "traveller". Their only other distinctive occupation at that period was fighting: as hardy mountain-dwellers they were valued for their stamina, and their supply of horses made them useful adjuncts to any military campaign. The Byzantine authorities seem not to have trusted them very much, and generally used them as auxiliaries; sometimes they functioned as quite independent irregular troops. But there are also references to an entire regiment of Vlach infantry in an early fourteenth-century Byzantine army.

In the early records the Vlachs are often a rather shadowy, passing presense. They moved from area to area, speaking the local language and merging into the local population: there are references in late Byzantine documents to "Bulgaro-Albano-Vlachs" and even "Serbo-Albano-Bulgaro-Vlacs". Other names for them include the Byzantine Greek "Mavrovlachos", "black Vlach", from which "Morlach" was derived, and the modern Greek "Koutsovlachos", literally "limping Vlach", which may be a folk-etymologized version ot the Turkish kucuk eflak, "little Vlach". the word "Vlach" itself comes from a term used by the early Slavs for those peoples they encountered who spoke Latin or Latinate languages: hence also "Wallachian", "Walloon" and and (by a more roundabout application) "Welsh".

There is no definite historical record of the Vlachs before the late tenth century. Before that, the only evidence which can be drawn on is linguistic. The Vlach language is a Latin language, very closely related to Romanian: linguists call it "Macedo-Romanian", and the Romanian of Romania "Daco-Romanian". Obviously it was the product of the Roman colonization of the Balkans, and had a continuous existence there, being encountered by the Slavs on their arrival in the sixth and seventh centuries. But the Roman empire in the Balkans covered a wide area, and this has given plenty of scope for modern nationalist historians to locate the origins of the Vlachs in whichever area they prefer: thus Greeks claim that the Vlachs are Romanized Greeks, Bulgarians say they are Romanized Dacians (and/or descendants of Roman legionaries in Dacia: it does not matter which, so long as they were there before the arrival of the Hungarians).

By far the most picturesque -- and preposterous -- theory is the one put forward by the distinguished Croat historian Father Mandic, who, investigating the origins of the Vlach-Serbs of Bosnia, has concluded that they were originally from Morocco. This, he thinks, would explain the Byzantine Greek word "Mavrovlachos" or "black Vlach": a reference to their dark, Moorish faces. His theory is that they are the descendants of Roman legionaries from Mauretania (modern Morocco) who were stationed in the Balkans. It is true that large numbers of legionaries were settled there by the Romans; but they included, as we have seen, people from all over the Empire. Of the only two military colonies of Mauretanians mentioned by Mandic, one was near the Black Sea in Bessarabia, and the other was on the river Inn, near Vienna. That is hardly a sufficient starting-point for an entire population in the southern Balkans. Though it will of course delight modern anti-Serb nationalists in Bosnia to learn that the Bosnian Serbs are really Africans (and it certainly trumps the modern Serb prejudice towards Albanians, which tends to treat them as if they were dark-faced people from the Third World), the theory cannot possibly be correct.

The true origin of the Vlachs can be worked out, however, from the linguistic evidence. The Vlach-Romanian language (which was a single language until the two main forms of it began to diverge in the early middle ages) has a large number of special features in common with Albanian. These include fundamental matters of grammar and syntax, a number of special idioms, and a core vocabulary of words connected with pastoral life. Albanian, the one survivor of the languages of the Illyrian tribes, also contains a huge number of words borrowed from Latin, indicating close contact with a Latinized population throughout the Roman period. A combination of historical linguistics, the study of place-names and the history of the Roman Empire yields the fairly certain conclusion that the heartland where both these languages developed was an area stretching from northern Albania through Kosovo and south-central Serbia: it may also have included parts of northern Macedonia and western Bulgaria. Most of the Romanized and Latin-speaking population of this area (whose version of Latin was influenced by their own language, Illyrian) was dispersed, destroyed or assimilated by the invasions of the dark ages, especially those of the Slavs. A remnant which practised pastoralism was able to survive in the mountains, unaffected by the Slavs' takeover of settled agriculture; and in the more remote mountains (especially those of northern Albania) it was also in close contact with an even earlier remnant, which still spoke the Illyrian language, albeit a version of Illyrian which had become heavily infused with Latin after centuries of contact. That is the explanation accepted by nearly all the independent scholars who have studied this question; unfortunately the issue has been bedevilled by misplaced national pride on the part of Romanian writers, who cannot accept that the first speakers of Romanian came from south of the Danube.

Since this northern Albanian and southern Serbian region was the original heartland of the Vlachs, it is not surprising that they should have spread out into the nearby uplands of Hercegovina from an early period. From there they moved northwards through the mountainous Dalmatian hinterland, where they are found tending flocks (and bringing them down to the coastal lands in the winter) as early as the twelfth century. There are many references to them in the records of Ragusa and Zadar from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Some of these pastoral Vlachs also penetrated as far as central Bosnia, where medieval place-names in the regions of Sarajevo and Travnik indicate their presence: Vlahinja, Vlaskovo, Vlasic. And many Vlach words connected with pastoral life were absorbed into Bosnian dialects of Serbo-Croat: trze, a late-born lamb, from the Vlach tirdziu, for example, or zarica, a type of cheese, from the Vlach zara. This last word is in fact a version of the Albanian word dhalle, "buttermilk" -- one of many details pointing to the pastoral symbiosis between Vlachs and Albanians, which continued to operate over a long period.

Most of these early Dalmatian and Bosnian Vlachs seem to have led quiet, secluded lives in the mountains. But in Hercegovina itself, where there was a large concentration of Vlachs, a more military and aggressive tradition developed. There are many complaints in Ragusan records of raids by these neighboring Vlachs during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Vlachs of Hercegovina were horse-breeders and caravan-leaders who, when they were not engaged in plunder, grew rich out of the trade between Ragusa and mines of Bosnia; some of them were probably responsible for commissioning the imposing Bosnian stone tombstones or stecci decorated with carvings of horsemen. Their trading links to the east must have brought them more into contact with the Vlach peoples of Serbia and Bulgaria, who had long traditions of military activity in the armies of the Byzantine emperors and Serbian kings.

One of the still unsolved mysteries of this story is the exact significance of the term "Morlach" ("Mavrovlachos", "black Vlach"), and how it came to be used in Hercegovina and Dalmatia. The obvious original meaning was a reference to the black cloaks worn by the Vlachs of the central Balkans (Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, northern Greece): they were also known at various times as "Karagounides" and "Crnogunjci", which literally mean "black-cloaks" in Turco-Greek and Serbian. Possibly a distinct wave of these Vlachs entered Hercegovina and Dalmatia, bringing the name (which they must have acquired in a Greek-speaking area) with them. It was quickly altered by Slav folk-etymology into "Morovlah", meaning "sea-Vlach" (i.e. coastal Vlach). From its use in Dalmatia the term later spread to the Vlachs in Croatia who filled the military border-zone or "krajina" round the north-western shoulder of Bosnia. "Morlacchi" became the standard Venetian name for these people, and region appears as "Morlacchia" on many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps. Because of their fearsome methods of irregular warfare the Morlachs acquired an evil reputation, and were regarded as primitive and brutal people. But all changed in the late eighteenth century when they were visited by an Italian priest, the Abbe Fortis. Inspired by the poetry of Ossian, and accompanied by another enthusiast for heroic poetry and folklore, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Fortis travelled among the Morlachs of the Dalmatian hinterland in search of poetry and primitive virtue. He found both: "The sincerity, trust, and honesty of these poor people...in all the ordinary actions of their life, would be called simplicity and weakness among us," he declared. He also heard plenty of poetry, noting that "A Morlacco travels along the desert mountains singing, especially in the night time, the actions of ancient Slavi Kings, and barons, or some tragic event"; and he observed that "the Bosnian dialect, spoken by the inland Morlacchi, is more harmonious, in my opinion, that the littoral Illyrian". The poem he printed in translation, Hasanaganica ("The Wife of Hasan Aga"), was in fact a Bosnian Muslim song; a short tale of tragic love and misunderstanding, it became one of the most popular specimens of folk poetry in the whole of Europe, and was translated by Goethe, Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Mérimée, Pushkin and Lermontov.

Inside Bosnia, the term Morlach was not so much used for the martial Vlachs who went to fill the border areas under the Ottomans. These Vlachs, who came from both Hercegovina and Serbia, were called either Vlachs or martolosi. The latter word referred to their military status, and so could include non-Vlachs too: it was a version of the Greek word for an armed man, armatolos. The Vlachs of Bosnia and Hercegovina had their own system of social and military organization, which is clearly defined in the early Ottoman documents: at the top of each local community was a magistrate or knez (an old Slav term); under him was a mayor or primikur (from the Greek, primikerios); below him was a lagator (from the Greek alagator, the head of a military detachment), and the basic military group was a gonder (from the Greek kontarion, or lance.) As these terms show, the Ottomans simply inherited a system which had been established to serve the armies of the Byzantine Empire. Like the Byzantine and Serbian rulers before them, they gave the Vlachs special tax privileges in return for their military services: the leaders of the Vlachs were given timars and treated virtually as spahis (Turkish cavalrymen), and their people were freed from the basic tax on non-Muslims, the haraç. The Vlachs did, however, pay a special "Vlach tax" -- rusum-i eflak -- consisting mainly of a sheep and a lamb from every household on St. George's day each year. Since they were taxed differently, they were listed differently in the Turkish defters. This enables us to see that in the late fifteenth century there were at least 35,000 Vlachs in Hercegovina, and in the sixteenth century as many as 82,692 mainly Vlach households (including some non-Vlach martolosi, with similar privileges) in the Smederovo region to the south of Belgrade. (Many of the Vlachs in the eastern part of Hercegovina had themselves been moved there by the Turks to repopulate areas devasted by fighting in the 1460s.) These were the main reservoirs of population from which the depopulated lands of northern Bosnia were filled. And because, living in Hercegovina and Serbia, they had long been members of the Orthodox Church, they established the Orthodox presence in that part of Bosnia which has lasted ever since.

How distinct were these Vlachs from the surrounding Slavs? Clearly they had a different status and a different social-military organization. Those who had moved into northern Bosnia could not practise the tradition of long-distance transhumance, and the evidence of sixteenth-century Ottoman decrees on the Vlachs of Bosnia and Hercegovina indicates that the majority of Vlachs were now sedentary; but their way of life still centred on stock-breeding and shepherding. Giovanni Lovrich noted in the 1770s that the Croatian Morlachs all had flocks of 200, 300 or 600 sheep, and when he asked why they were so reluctant to till the soil, they replied: "Our ancestors didn't do it, so neither shall we." Some writers, especially Serbian ones, have argued that the term "Vlach" was used just to mean "shepherd" and did not imply any ethnic or linguistic difference -- so that most of these people were really just Serbs with sheep. This view is rejected by the leading modern expert on Vlachs in the early Ottoman Balkans, who insists that they were regarded as distinct population.

Vlachs have always been bilingual, and since they were never the administrators, the language which has survived in the records is never their own one. But we do have some evidence of its use, apart from the appearance in the records of Vlach personal names such as Ursul and Sarban. Vlachs who moved to an Adriatic island in the fifteenth century were still speaking Vlach there four hundred years later. One sixteenth-century Venetian writer described the Vlachs of the Dalmatian hinterland as speaking "Latin, though in a corrupted form"; shepherds in those mountains were still using Vlach counting-words as recently as 1985. There is other evidence of bilingualism in the seventeenth century, even though the writer Ioannes Lucius (Ivan Lukic) stated that the language had disappeared by then. But of course, having lived for centuries among the Slavs of Hercegovina and Serbia, these Vlachs could be outwardly indistinguishable (in speech and dress) from the ordinary Slavs of those regions. The suggestion that they must have been monoglot Vlachs, because they did not bring the Serbian ekavian dialect when they came from Serbia into northern Bosnia, is certainly false. They spoke whatever the Slavs around them spoke, which may have changed over time in an area as subject to demographic flux as northern Bosnia; and the Vlachs from Hercegovina would have spoken jekavian anyway.

Some attempts have been made to prove that there was still a Vlach-speaking population in Bosnia as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century. Sixteen "Romanian-speaking" villages were mentioned in the 1910 census for Bosnia, and in 1906 an enthusiastic Romanian Vlachophile published an entire about the "Romanian colonies" which he had found there. When the leading German expert on the Vlachs, Professor Weigand, went to check these claims in the following year, he found that the only Vlach villages consisted of people who had migrated from Macedonia in the eighteenth century and had since lost the use of their language. The "Romanian-speaking" villagers, known locally as "Karavlasi" or "black Vlachs", were indeed speaking Romanian; this was because they were not Vlachs at all, but Romanian gypsies from Transylvania.

Finally, it is necessary to point out that there is little sense today in saying that the Bosnian Serbs are "really" Vlachs. Over the centuries many ordinary members of the Serbian Orthodox Church would have crossed the Drina into Bosnia or moved north from Hercegovina; a Serb merchant class also became important in Bosnian towns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not all the people who were sent to populate northern Bosnia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Vlach, and since then there have been so many influxes and exoduses in Bosnian history that we cannot possibly calculate precise percentages for the "Vlach" ancestry of the Bosnian Serbs. Nor did the Vlachs contribute only to the Serb population; some (mainly in Croatia) became Catholics, and quite a few were Islamicized in Bosnia. To call someone a Serb today is to use a concept constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries out of a combination of religion, language, history and the person's own sense of identification: modern Bosnian Serbs can properly describe themselves as such, regardless of Vlach ancestry. But it is still slightly piquant to think, when one hears so-called right-wing Russian politicians talking about the need to defend their ancient Slav brothers in Bosnia, that the one component of the Bosnian population which has a large and identifiable element of non-Slav ancestry is the Bosnian Serbs.

Reprinted by permission of the author and New York University Press from

Contents

Religion and language

Most Vlachs are Eastern Orthodox Christians by faith and they speak the Vlach (Romanian) language. The language spoken by one major group of Vlachs is similar to the Oltenian dialect spoken in Romania while that of the other major group is similar to the Romanian dialect of Banat.

The Serbian Vlachs belong to the Serbian Orthodox Church, however, by the canon of Orthodox church, no other local Orthodox church is allowed to operate within its territory. The relative isolation of the Vlachs has permitted the survival of various pre-Christian religious rites that are frowned upon by the Orthodox Church. Like the Serbs, Vlachs celebrate the 'slava', though its meaning is chtonic (related to the house and farmland) rather than familial.

Although the Vlachs of the Timočka Krajina are culturally and linguistically cognate to Romanians, their history since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century has significantly affected their political and cultural orientation towards the Serbian state and church.

Of these, the Ungurjani or 'Ungureni' of Homolje are related to the Romanians of Banat and Transylvania, since 'Ungureni' (compare with the word "Hungarians") is a term used by the Romanians of Wallachia to describe their kin who once lived in provinces formerly part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The connection is evident in the similarities of dialectal phonology and folk music motifs as well as in sayings such as "Ducă-se pe Mureş" (May the Mureş take it away), a reference to the Transylvanian river.

The Ţărani (Carani) of the Bor, Negotin and Zaječar regions are closer to the Olteni in their speech and music. The Ţăran saying 'Nu dau un leu pe el' (He's not worth even a leu) can possibly show their Romanian origin since the leu is a Romanian monetary unit. However, it can also show a possible trade connections between Carani and the Romanian population that live just across the Danube.

There has been considerable intermixing between the Ungureni and Ţărani so that a dialect has evolved sharing peculiarities of both regions.

There is also a group of Vlachophone Roma centered around the village of Lukovo, as well a few Aromanian families who live in Knjaževac but they form a tiny migrant group.

Origins

Part of the Vlachs of East Serbia were settled there from the regions north of Danube in early 18th century. Most of them were colonized by Habsburg state on lands that were emptied during the so-called "Great Migration of Serbs" (1689-90; as an interesting note, when referring to those refugees, sources often call them Vlachs) when tens of thousands of Serbs fled this region to escape Turkish reprisals for the insurection.

The origin of some Vlachs of Serbia is also visible from their own self-designations: Ungurjani, who came from Hungary (i.e. Transylvania). The Carani (Ţărani) are either authocthonic Vlach population of the region (Their name means "people of the country" or "countrymen") either they came from Walachia (in Romanian Tara Romanesca - "Romanian State"). Both of the two above stated regions of present-day Romania as well as Serbia were in possession of Habsburg Empire from 1717, but Serbia was lost in 1739 to Turks.

The area (mainly Timok Valley) where the bulk of Vlachs live was part of modern Serbia starting from 1830. Prior to that, the land was part of the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire (Pashalic of Vidin and Pashalic of Smederevo).

The second wave of Vlachs from present-day Romania came in the beginning of the 19th century. In 1835 feudalism was fully abolished in the Principality of Serbia and a large number of individuals and smaller groups from Walachia came there to beneficiate from the status of free peasants.

The conception that all Vlachs of Serbia are descendants of original Roman population of Balkans that never moved from this region is possibly incorrect. A romance-speaking population certainly existed in the mountainous region in Middle Ages, but probably it mostly disappeared by the 15th century, partly due to intermixing with Slavs and partly due to Serb migrations from the South, mostly the region of Kosovo. However, some of the Vlachs of Serbia are descendants of the original romance-speaking population that survived Slavic migrations.

Also, the Vlachs from area aroung Vidin in Bulgaria, with whom the Vlachs of Timok form a continuous group, separated only by the Danube by the rest of Romanians, are natives to the area, not being the result of colonisation or emigration.

Population

Area inhabited by Vlachs in 2004 according to Romanian organizations

In the 2002 census 40,054 people declared themselves ethnic Vlachs, and 54,818 people declared themselves speakers of the Vlach language[1]. The Vlachs of Serbia are recognized as an autochthonous ethnic group, separate to the Romanians of Serbia, which number 34,576 according to the 2002 census. On the census, the Vlachs declared themselves either as Serbs or Vlachs. Therefore, the real number of Vlach people is much greater than the number of recorded Vlachs, both due to mixed marriages with Slavs and also Serbian national feeling among some full-blooded Vlachs.

Historical population (according to different censuses)

The following numbers reflect on the possible number of Vlachs in the censuses:

Vlach identity

Despite their recognition as a separate ethnic group by the Serb government, Vlachs are cognate to Romanians in the cultural and linguistic sense. Some Romanians, as well as international linguists and anthropologists, consider Serbia's Vlachs to be a subgroup of Romanians. Additionally, the Movement of Romanians-Vlachs in Serbia, which represents some Vlachs, has called for the recognition of the Vlachs as a Romanian national minority, giving them similar rights to the Romanians of Vojvodina. However most Vlachs of Eastern Serbia opt either for the Vlach, Serb or even Yugoslav identity before the Romanian one.[1]

Romania has given modest financial support to the Vlachs for the preservation of their culture and language, since at present the Vlachs' language is not recognized officially in any localities where they form a majority, there is no education in their mother tongue and there is no media or education funded by the Serbian state. Also there are no church services in Vlach and the giving of baptismal Vlach names is not permitted.

Family names of Vlachs are Serbian, or sound Serbian because of the late 19th century edict that all citizens of Serbia have last names ending in -ić, the base of the name usually coming from the then father's name: Nikolić, Marković, Radulović. There are a few notable exceptions where the Vlach / Romanian origin is evident, as in Jepurović (from iepure, meaning rabbit), Florić (from floare, meaning flower) or Stngačilović (from stangaci, meaning left-handed).

On the other hand, some Vlachs consider themselves to be simply Serbs that speak the Vlach language. In fact ethnic research has found that among the Serb-speaking population of Eastern Serbia, some are Slavicized Vlachs and some Vlach-speakers were formerly Slavs (such as in the village of Šljivar) or even Roma (such as in Lukovo). Most Vlachs do not see themselves as ethnic Romanians, because, while culturally and linguistically cognate to Romanians, they have lived in Serbia for generations and hence do not identify with the Romanian nation, but rather see themselves as a distinct Eastern Romance people.

Many of those Vlachs who see themselves as Serbs were historically hard-line Serbian nationalists, and many fought as volunteers on the Serbian side in the wars in Krajina and Bosnia, together with Serbs from those regions whom they saw as religious and ethnic brethren. One of the reasons why Vlachs consider Serbs to be their ethnic brethren is because many Serbs have Vlach origin. The Serbian Orthodox Church has played a large role in this. In addition, during the Ottoman rule, Serbs migrated from the cities and valleys to the mountains where they mixed with Vlach population; thus, many present-day Serbs have both Slavic and Vlach blood.

It must be noted that Vlach is commonly used as a historical umbrella term for all Latin peoples in Southeastern Europe, including Romanians. In more recent usage, it is a synonym for Latin peoples south of the Danube, hence excluding Romanians. The old meaning is the origin for the modern Vlach ethnic identity, since Vlachs see themselves as descendants of those ancient Vlach peoples, and rather see Romanians as a subgroup of the Vlachs than Vlachs as a subgroup of Romanians. From the Vlach point of view, Romanians are those Vlachs who created their state of Romania and succeeded in gaining world acceptance for their own name for themselves, rather than the exonym term Vlach. In their own language Vlachs never use the term Vlach, but Rumân. They call their language rumâneşce.

External links

Monday, 18 September 2006

"At the end of the 19th century, there were about 150,000 Vlachs in the southern Balkans, and about half the Greek population of Thessaloniki in fact consisted of Vlachs.After 1912-13 about 100,000 (2/3 of them) became Greek citizens. Since then, they have been much reduced due to emigration and assimilation. The 1951 census, the last time that minorities were counted in Greece, recorded 39,385 Vlachs. Around 2003, there may be 20,000 people in Greece who consider themselves Vlach.

Traditionally, there was a broad spectrum of living conditions and thought among Vlachs. They ranged from isolated and illiterate mountain dwellers of Albania to cosmopolitan merchants and directors of Greek schools. However, the groups that attracted the most attention were the transhumant shepherds. Many foreign visitors were impressed by the picturesque nomads and semi-nomads they saw in Macedonia, with their dresses, occupations, languages, and ability to manage in difficult conditions.

Most interesting were three shepherd groups: The Arvanito-Vlachs (Farsarotes), Vlachs, and Sarakatsani. Despite the unclear meaning of their name, the Sarakatsani spoke Greek in the 19th century, so their Greekness was not disputed. The Arvanito-Vlachs, whose women often wore long hats, had Albanian names that indicated long cohabitation with Albanians. Travelers also wrote a lot about the ‘generic’ Vlachs. The northern type was considered light colored and with features different from neighboring groups, while the southern types were shorter and darker.(Geographically, however, northern and southern dialects are mixed.) They lived free on the mountaintops, were considered hard-working and smart, and many chelniks (goat-herding chiefs) had considerable flocks and wealth. The women who set up households in different places every day when the flocks moved, had more social freedoms than Greek women.

The Vlachs themselves have no traditions that they came from some other part of the world, and no songs or tales have survived regarding some Roman general or the green pastures of a distant country that they lost during the Slavic invasions. All Macedonian Vlachs whom Weigand consulted around 1890 indicated that they lived pretty much in their ancestral country. Populations had moved but over relatively short distances.

However, the Vlachs speak a language that has no close relation to the area languages, so many people assumed that they must have come from somewhere else. There are many Greek words in Vlach,but they are mainly modern Greek.Finally, Vlachs share some traditions with Greeks (e.g. the Kalikantzaroi spirits) but not others, such as the prohibition of unmarried women from going to church.Briefly, theories about their origin have been.

Roman legions. Greeks and foreign travelers of the 18-20th centuries expressed the opinion that the Vlachs are descendants of Roman legions who stayed on to guard the narrow mountain passes and eventually became shepherds. The various versions of the theory do not take much account of the women’s nationality, though women were needed to father children.

Thracians - Diaspora Romanians. Romanian historians hypothesized that between the 6th and 10th centuries, the Vlachs left their country north of the Danube and descended in the southern Balkans, possibly where the grasslands were better. Pro-Romanian authors (e.g. Tache Papahagi) considered the Vlachs relatives of the Romanians, parts of Pelasgian and Thracian tribes that were Latinized. According to this view, the Thracians inhabited the area from Romania to Macedonia, but the Slavic invasions that started in the 6th century fragmented it. Today this theory makes little sense.The Pelasgians were a historical anachronism, and ancient Macedonians have been rather conclusively shown to be a Greek tribe.

Partly Slavs. The Slavs moved to the Balkans during the 7th century, influenced the Vlach-speaking populations, and maybe displaced some.Although there was no specific effort to prove that the Vlachs were Slavs, this argument was used to prove that the Vlachs were not Greek.

Jews. Benjamin of Tudela, a 12th century Sephardic rabbi suspected that at least the Vlach bandits of Thessaly had Jewish origin because although they robbed Jews, they called them brethren and did not killed them as they did others.

A distinct local ethnicity. More recent Romanian historians consider that the Vlachs are a specific nation possibly descending from Pelasgians, Illyrians, Thracians, Macedonians (they consider the latter non-Greek) and other groups that were Latinized. This position is explained in the ‘Dodecalog of the Vlachs’ that has an almost religious fervor.The adherents of this theory get support from the observations of foreign travelers who perceived the mountain Vlachs as different from Greeks. The tendency of many Vlachs to identify with Greeks is attributed to religion,adoption of Greek names that implied a higher social status,and a tendency of becoming easily assimilated in local populations.Some people call themselves Macedono-Vlachs and focus on the Vlach presence in the greater Macedonia of Ottoman times.

Latinized local inhabitants. Some contemporary Greek historians think that the Vlachs are main Latinized Greek populations. According to this theory, the Vlachs of the Greek peninsula and cities in the north where Greek communities also lived are originally Greek. By the same theory, Vlachs who lived beyond the borders of Greek communities are probably not Greek. Indeed, many Vlachs of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Albania do not consider themselves Greek and have traditionally lived north of the Greek borders.

The origin of Vlachs could be clarified through comparisons of DNA samples (deoxyribonucleic acid) of various populations. The various Vlach groups could be compared among themselves and with Greeks, Romanians, and Albanians. However, no genetic studies have been done on the Vlachs. The existing DNA studies on Greeks (which include some Vlachs as part of the general population) show that Greeks are quite homogeneous and that the populations of Macedonia and Epirus are more closely related.Greeks are different from Turks and Bulgarians but quite similar to other Europeans, particularly to Italians. So, even if the Vlachs are descendants of (male) Romans, they are a genetically related population. Hopefully, more research will take place later on, though political repercussions may raise obstacles. Without it there is simply not sufficient evidence regarding the origin of various Vlach groups."

This is a controversial issue. In my opinion nobody knows the truth about the Vlachs. Here in Greece there are few people now who claim that they are Vlachs but they insist on their Greek origin. There are many Vlachs who left Greece during the 20th century and live now in Romania (Romanians claim that Vlachs are of Romanian origin). But even in their alleged (by the Romanian propaganda) home-country, the Vlachs don’t change their mind and still rumor their Greekness and the fact that the Greek state put obstacles on their way to come back to Greece as Greek citizens while it accepts other non Greek populations like Albanians, Russians etc.

Monday, 18 September 2006

The arrival of the Slavs in the sixth century A.D, overwhelmingly changed the ethnic and linguistic composition of the peoples of the southern Balkans. But it seems that at least one pre-Slav group, who came to be known most commonly as Vlachs, survived the onslaught. With the arrival of the Slavs, they took to the uplands or migrated. Their most important distinguishing feature was their language, which was derived from Latin and, as is evident from the small groups that still survive today, is closely related to Romanian. It seems that, living in many areas cheek by jowl with the Serbs, a good part of the Vlachs were to assimilate with them, so contributing to the later creation of Orthodox and thus eventually Serb populations in parts of Bosnia, Hercegovina and Croatia.

After the Turks arrived, the Vlachs (who were moving before the Turkish conquest) were encouraged by the Turks to continue to do so afterwards. The Vlachs were mostly but not all Orthodox. The two main areas towards which they moved were Dalmatia and north and north-west Bosnia: regions which were later to have substantial Serbian populations.

Today it is believed that the ancestors of the Vlachs were nomadic clansmen who crisscrossed the Balkans following the rise of cities in classical antiquity. The cities needed food and so a class of nomads or semi-nomads arose to take care of large flocks of sheep, goats and other cattle which they drove over long distances to take advantage of seasonal grazing lands. In Roman times cheese from the flocks of Dalmatia and areas now in modern Albania and Serbia was exported to other parts of the empire. Many of the people who subsequently came to be called Vlachs began to speak Latin during the centuries of Roman rule and preserved this tongue as they moved higher into mountainous regions with the arrival of the Slavs. But in the middle ages a new dynamic was at work. Vlachs, and others, continued to cover large distances across the Balkans, often with huge flocks of thousands of animals. They were encouraged in this by the Byzantine taxation system, which was easier to evade if one was constantly on the move rather than if one was attached to the estate of a feudal baron. In the late eleventh century Vlach cheese and woollen garments were recorded as being found in the markets of Constantinople.

The Turks encouraged the Vlachs in their activities because of the demand in Ottoman cities for milk, cheese, wool and leather. What becomes far less clear is to what extent nomads in areas also inhabited by Serbs were in fact Serbs, because many of these Vlachs would have become Orthodox, like their more settled neighbours, and, over time, adopt their language too. They also started to settle permanently in areas of Dalmatia and Bosnia and may well have mixed with other Latin-speakers who had fled to the hills to escape the Slav invasions of the Adriatic coastal cities. While we know that there were Serbs and Orthodox populations in early medieval Dalmatia, it subsequently becomes harder to disentangle later Vlach and Serb migrations. Many Serbian historians claim that by the early middle ages all Vlachs were so Slavonicised as really to be Serbs, but the issue is far from being so clearcut. Alberto Fortis, who toured Dalmatia in the late eighteenth century, wrote in some detail of the Morlacchi, or Vlassi as they called themselves. Fortis placed them in inland Dalmatia, in areas around the River Krka, which runs by Jelena's monastery and through Knin. He added that they also lived along the border with Bosnia, through Hercegovina and down to the Bay of Kotar in modern-day Montenegro. Their language, he wrote, resembled `Rascian and Bulgarian'.

In his account Fortis outlined the divisions and tensions among the people of the region called `Morlacchia'. The Vlassi despised the people of the coastal towns, who heartily detested them in return. However, between themselves, `A most perfect discord reigns ... as it generally does in other parts, between Latin [that is, Catholic] and Greek [that is, Orthodox] communion, which their respective priests fail not to foment, and tell a thousand little scandalous stories of each other. The churches of the Latins are poor, but not very dirty: those of the Greeks are equally poor, and shamefully ill kept.' In other words, whatever their origins, these Vlassi, Vlachs or Morlachs were the progenitors not only of a good part of the Serbian population of Dalmatia but of the Catholic Croats as well. As late as May 1941 briefing notes prepared for Mussolini, whose troops had just moved into Dalmatia, talked of Orthodox Serbs from the mountains as being `for the most part ex-Morlachs'. Likewise reference was made to `Catholic Morlachs, peasants, today self-styled Croats'.

In many parts of Dalmatia and Bosnia Croatian or Serbian identity was not so deeply entrenched, even well into this century, as people would describe themselves as Catholic or Orthodox or Dalmatian before they would as Serb or Croat. National identity was to develop late in these mixed regions.

Some of Fortis' other observations are also worth recording here. Describing the Hajduks or bandits of the region, he wrote:

The greatest part of the Haiduks look upon it as a meritorious action, to shed the blood of the Turks; a mistaken zeal for religion, joined to their natural and acquired ferocity, easily lead them to commit such acts of violence; and the ignorance, and national prejudices of their priests are too apt to inflame their barbarous fanaticism.

Despite these details, at no time does Fortis talk of the Orthodox population as anything else but Morlach or Vlachs. The word Serb is never employed and nor is the word Croat for the Catholics. He does record, though, that as far as he could discern there was no mention of these people in the records of Dalmatia before the thirteenth century. It does not help us either that in Bosnia especially the term Vlassi or Vlach has always been a pejorative term for Serb and that in Trieste the term Morlach is still used contemptuously to describe the neighbouring Slavs in general. But it is clear that these Vlachs/Vlassi/Morlachs were securely enough established in the region for the records to speak definitely of their presence by 1345. One source from 1376 names a Petar Martic as a `Duke of Knin and the Vlachs'.

In Bosnia similar complicated demographic shifts during the middle ages were to contribute to the complex patterns of settlement which characterised the republic before the 1992-5 war. Although many Serbs fled the initial Turkish onslaughts, the creation of a large Orthodox population came later, after the conquest of Bosnia. Hercegovina by contrast was predominantly Orthodox, although the Catholic church made major inroads there in the century before the arrival of the Turks. The legacy of this was that on the eve of war in 1992 eastern Hercegovina was predominantly Serbian, while western Hercegovina was mainly Croat.

In northern Bosnia the years after the Ottoman conquest were to see an influx of Orthodox populations brought to the area by the Turks, who needed to repopulate it after the devastations wrought by war and plague. Vlachs were encouraged to move by reductions in the tax on their flocks if they lived or roamed in a certain area. Serbs too were to arrive or be brought by the Turks to the same regions, where as in Dalmatia they were eventually to absorb the Vlach part of the Orthodox population. In this the Serbian Orthodox, that is, national, church was to provide Serbian identity with a major boost and so give the Serbian part of the population the dominating edge over the Vlachs, who had no national institutions of their own.

After taking Serbia and Bosnia, the Turks were not to take Slavonia, the land north of the Sava river, until 1537. Between 1459 and that date many Serbs and Vlachs living along the Danube border were given privileges in exchange for military duties. In this way they frequently found themselves fighting Serbs and Vlachs who were also being granted privileges for military services by the Hungarians. But with the Ottoman advance into Slavonia the Turks needed people to repopulate the land from which many of the Catholic inhabitants had fled. Serbs and Vlachs were thus resettled here, either voluntarily or forcibly. This movement was simultaneous with the Ottoman shifts of population in northern Bosnia and other border regions.

The Military Frontier

The granting of privileges to soldiers and their families on the Habsburg side of the border was the precursor of the Military Frontier, the Vojna Krajina. At its zenith this great defensive line was to stretch 1,000 miles, varying in width from 30 to 100 kilometres. It was to begin at the Adriatic, skirt around the western and northern borders of Ottoman Bosnia, along the Danube and then along Transylvania's borders with the Ottoman Danubian principalities. These military marches were a prodigious feat of organisation and many of the frontier's great fortresses still survive. Only with the defeat of the Krajina Serbs in 1995 was their final living vestige erased from the map of Europe.

If there is a Croatian national myth it is that of the Antemurale Christianitatis, that is to say the `outer wall' or bulwark of Christianity. During the centuries of the Ottoman presence in Bosnia this had a literal meaning, but it has resurfaced in subsequent conflicts with the Serbs in a different guise. With the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croatian leaders presented themselves to the world as the defenders of western civilisation against the last gasp of Serbian `Bolshevism' and sought to represent Croatia as a Central European country as opposed to a `Byzantine' Balkan one.

The creation of the Military Frontier was the physical Antemurale. Following the conquest of Bosnia in 1463, the Ottoman threat to Croatia and Slavonia was very real. By 1471 Turkish cavalry had even reached Ljubljana on a campaign of pillage across the Croatian and Slovenian countryside. In 1493 the Croats suffered their historic defeat at Krbavsko Polje. After this, much of Croatia and Dalmatia fell to the Ottomans and it was lamented that what was left outside Turkish control was but the `remains of the remains'. It was into these newly acquired lands that the Ottomans brought Vlachs and Serbs to serve as their frontiersmen. In time many of these people were to cross over to what had become Habsburg as opposed to simply Hungarian lands after 1527. There they swore loyalty to the imperial crown while pledging to defend the imperial frontiers. In 1538 for example Emperor Ferdinand I granted privileges to a group of Serbs who were settling around Zumberak on the border between Croatia and Slovenia. In return for their military services they were exempted from taxes for the next twenty years. The charter also stated that `everything they take from the Turks ... and pillage, it all belongs to the Rascians themselves'.

In this way Serbs and Vlachs, to the extent that they remained distinguishable, were encouraged to keep crossing into the Military Frontier from Bosnia and the Ottoman-held lands. They were further encouraged as comparable `Vlach' privileges were eroded within the Ottoman Empire. Catholics who had fled or emigrated from parts of Bosnia, Hercegovina and Slavonia also settled there.

A major act in the development of the Military Frontier was the building of the garrison town of Karlovac in the late sixteenth century. Around Karlovac, a region was set up in which the peasant soldiery was not only granted privileges but exempted from Croatian authority. Later, under Ferdinand II, the areas that were to become the Military Frontier were subjected directly to imperial rule and were divided into two parts, the Croatian Krajina (`Frontier') governed from Karlovac and the Slavonian Krajina from Varazdin. At that time Karlovac was on the border of the Ottoman Empire. In 1991 it was to become a border town again, with Krajina Serbs bombarding it heavily from its southern suburbs, which were again the frontlines. This was no accident of history: there was a high concentration of Serbs there as a direct legacy of the wars with the Ottomans.

In 1630 Ferdinand II issued the STATUTA VALACHORUM, which defined the status of the Serbs, or Vlachs as they are called in the decree. Again the key principles were military service in exchange for lands.

Sunday, 17 September 2006

Regarded as one of the native components and oldest communities in the Balkan Peninsula, the Ulahs are the one of minorities living in Greece and non-Greek.

The New Encyclopedia Britannica describes them as " … a European people living in mostly Kamanya and Moldova and spreaded to several places in Europe … " and states "although many Slavs call them Volokh, Ulahs call themselves Romani, Romeni, Rumeni or Armoni". The Encyclopedia Americana gives information under the title "they are a people living in Moldavia, and called Volokh, but they prefer to call themselves Romani" .Greeks describe them as Hellens speaking a different dialect and even Latinized Hellens in the Roman Empire. Beside this argument contrary to historical, ethnologic, linguistic facts, Ulahs are a Latin-originated community speaking a dialect similar to Rumenian and using the Latin, Greek or Crill alphabet according to the county they live in.

Greece does not recognize Ulahs' ethnic identity and does not give correct information about their number. Based on 1951 the census, Greeks say the number of the Ulahs was 39855 and allege that they may reach about 15-20.000 now.

Indeed it is impossible to form and opinion about the number of Ulahs, several research institutes and organizations claim that this number could be between 250.000 and 1.200.000.

About the Ulah Minority, whose ethnical identity is not recognized by Greece, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs Evangalos Averof expressed that this number must have been between 150.000 and 200.000 for 1948.

Until the 9th Century there is no information about the Ulahs, after the second half of the 900s they gave their names to Teselya, Akarnania, Aetolia and Epir regions. It is mentioned about the Ulahs"'" fight against Byzantium under the command of the Bulgarian Tsar in the 11th century.

One of the most important turning points in Ulahs' history is that they were recognized as a nation by the Ottoman Empire in 1905. The establishment of the "Macedoneian - Rumanian Committee", founded in 1860 in Bukres, and educational activities of bishop Margarit exposed an intense consciousness movement for Ulahs in the second half of the 19th century.

Margarit"'"s education of the Ulahian youth and teaching them Ulahian stimulated Rum-Orthodox patriarchate which had formed an indisputable superiority over the Balkanian Orthodox was disturbed by this development. Upon this Margarit went to Bucharest and joined the Macedonian - Rumanian Committee. Many Ulah students were educated in their own language through the said committee. In the meantime, the first Romanian School was opened in Tirnova in 1864.

The Ulah"'"s education in their own language was only possible within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. From 1892, the Ottoman Empire dwelled upon the Ulah issue, and allowed them to get education in their own school and their own teachers in their own language.

The number of the Ulahian people was about 600.000 within the Ottoman Empire borders from the 1890's. These people became an important exploitation factor for countries looking for land in Balkans . Against the pressure of the Bulgarian and Greek-Orthodox Patriartchates, a group consisting of Ulahian representatives requested help from the Ottoman Empire.

The Romanian Government allotted 600.000 Frank to Ulahs schools and churches to prevent pressures and activities to Hellenisation and Bulgarisation efforts in the Balkans.

The recognition of these rights by the Ottoman administration was appreciated in Romania and written about in the Independence Romanian newspaper dated December 23, 1903. In addition to this, the newspaper has also stated that the Ulahs were recognized by the Ottoman administration. It is understood that the acceptance of the help from the Romanian government to the Ulahs by the Ottoman government and support for the freedom of the churches and schools were interpreted as recognization of the Ulahs.

While the recognition of the Ulahs rights by the Ottoman administration resulted in the reaction of the Patriarchate and Greeks living in the region, the Romanian minister of foreign affairs have Istanbul because of the permission given by of the administrator for the opening of an Ulah church in the monastery and performing of their religious ceremonies in their own language. The Ulahs celebrated the opening of their church, which they saw as a victory over the Greeks, with demonstrations.

The Ulahs entered a new period having equal rights for the first time in their history. In addition to the right of electing their own leaders they also had the right to be represented in the Ottoman assembly. In the period until the Balkan wars Ulah members with other representatives worked in Meclis-i Mebusan.

Ulah settlements, especially in the Epir-Pindus region, were constantly attacked by the Greek gangs. Terror movements and/or Hellenization policy against the Ulahs in this region continued from the occupation of Tesalia by Greece in 1901 to the Balkan Wars.

In this period, which lasted from the recognition of the Ulahs by the Ottoman administration and the aid provided by Romania to 1912, the number of Ulah primary schools rose to 114, and high schools to 4 and they published more than 20 newspapers and magazines in their own language.

OPPRESSION Of THE ULAH MINORITY BY THE GREEK GOVERNMENT :

In the intensifying politically competitive environment of the 19th century over Epir – Macedonia – Teselia, the Ulahs have been tried to be sided with by the rival powers and games were played on them. Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania while trying to expand their territories also tried to show the Ulah population under their ethnic population. Furthermore the fact that the Ulahs were a nomadic nation and spoke a number of languages caused them to be shown as an extention of these nations in there kinds of statistical games.

The Balkan Wars of 1912 – 1913 caused the Ottoman Empire to lose its territories to the Meriç River and affected the remaining non – Greek population"'"s lives in adversely. Athens administration did not have the tolerance for the Ulahs and other non – Greek population as much as the Ottoman administration had. Moreover, Greece accepted the Ulahs as a minority in the Bucharest Treaty in 1913 but managed to decrease the percentage of Ulah the children going to their own schools through policies of mental oppression and deterrence.

In the period between the two wars, especially during the Melaksas dictatorship, as a result of state terror in Greece, the Ulahs as well as the Macedonians were forced to learn Greek, adults were forced to attend night schools and discrimination was made between the children and the young who attended the Ulah schools and learned Ulah / Romanian and the ones who attended the Greek schools and learnt Greek. This state and social oppression on the Ulahs and practices like banning the use of their native tongue have broken their resistance to a great extent. All these have been made in spite of the Treaty of Bucharest which was signed in 1913 and dictated that Greece would allow Romanian financed Ulah schools in its territory.

In the Second World War some parts of Greece were attacked by the Italian forces and the Ulahs were used in these attacks. As a result of these attacks an Ulah princedom under Italian direction was founded under the leadership of Alkibiades Diamandi who was an Ulah. Diamandi, who was declared as the prince of this autonomous structure, was also the commander of a military force named '"'Romanian legion'"' and included the Ulah princedom Macedonia, Teselia as well as Pindus Princedom Epir.

However the post war events, the defeat of Italy, the alliance of Greece with the Allies who won the war resulted in the failure of this undertaking. Romania stopped the support for the Ulahs as a result of being in the Moscow directed block after the war and Bucharest no longer gave any financial support for the Ulah schools and churches

THE REACTIONS OF THE ULAHS AGAIST GREECE'S AND INDIVIDUALS,INSTITUTIONS AND ESTABLISHMENTS THAT CONDUCTED STUDIES CONCERNING THE ULAH MINORITY

After the Wold War 2, some Ulahs ,who thought they were different from the Greeks, could not resist the assimilation policies of Greece and united with Greece , other Ulahs emigrated to the USA, Australia and established the 'Ulah Diaspora"'". Although the Ulahs who settled down in rural areas continued to speak their own language; people who moved to the cities began speaking the Greek language.

Among the Ulahs that emigrated to Germany and France some who were influenced by the 1975 Helsinki Human Rights Final Act carried out important activities dating from the 1980s. One of them ,Vasile Barbara, first in Mannheim and then in Freiburg established '"'The Union Für Aromunische Sprache und Kultur'"', contacted The University of Freiburg and with the help of the "'"Chair of Romanistic' she initiated the "'"language and literature"'" movement. This association publishes a periodical that was called Zborlu A Nostru , too. The Union Für Aromunische Sprache und Kultur signed a protocol with the Romantic Chairs of The University of Mannheim and The University of Freiburg and realized the first "'"International Chair Of Aromance"'".

There are 3000 members of the Ulah Diaspora in Germany. They are trying to continue their identity and particularly their language through the Union Fur Romantic Sprache und Kultur and Zentrum Fur Aromunische Studien that was established in 1995.

The document entitled 'The European Charter of Regional and Minority Languages"'" ,which was prepared by the Ministers Committee of the European Council in1994, came into force in 1998 and was signed by Greece too, envisages conservation including the Ulah language. Although an enterprise called EBLUL, foresees keeping in existence the languages spoken less and is supported by EU. It"'"s known that this enterprise causes reactions in Greece, that is a member of the EU.

Although activities of associations such as the Union of Panhellenistic Ulah Cultural Associations are permitted in Greece recently ; these associations were mainly established for declaring the Ulahs as "'"Greeks speaking the Ulah language'. The movement of Ulahs is still tried to keep under control in Greece.

In recent years it is identified that the Ulahs did some initiatives in Romania and they expected support, because their rights and existence are in danger. Within this framework the union active in Freiburg made a call upon the Parliament Of Romania in 1994. With the intensive studies of Vasile Barbara the report was presented to both Bucharest and the European Council was fruitful in 1996 and 1997, so the European Council took up the Ulah problem. The European Council adopted the report of the Spanish member of parliament Lluis Maria de Puig, which concerning the Ulahs and this report was accepted unanimously on June 24,1997(1).

In the report of Lluis Maria de Puig concerning the Ulahs such as:

Greek authorities do not recognize the Ulahs as a separate ethnic group. They describe them as the Greek people speaking Ulah Language or Latin. Greek officials take the census of 1951 as a basis for the population of Ulahs say that the population was 25000 in 1951 and it has decreased since that time CONSEQUENCE:

Greece's permanent Representative in the European Council says that Ulahs have Greek ethnic consciousness and among these people there are very famous men of letters ,artists, scientists and politicians that represent the Greek nation.

The European Council has accepted the report of Lluis Maria de Puig and exposed the problems of the Ulahs. They have also said that the rights of Ulahs must be preserved but Greece , although it is a member of EU, continues to ignore these documents and insists on the manifesto idea that includes "'"There is no minority in Greece'.

Richard Clagg(2) points out that the Ulahs speak a language that is very close to the Roman language emphasizes these people are an important minority in Greece. Wace and Thompson who did important research in the region also say that the Ulah language is an independent and different language on the Latin-originated languages.

Although Greece is a member of the EU, it ignores the reality on its lands which it has possessed lands after 1913 and denies the existence of the Ulah Minority

Sunday, 17 September 2006

VLACHS. The Vlach (Vlakh, Wallach) or Ruman race constitutes a distinct division of the Latin family of peoples, Distriba- widely disseminated throughout south-eastern Europe, tion of both north and south of the Danube, and extending the Vlach sporadically from the Russian river Bug to the race. Adriatic. The total numbers of the Vlachs may be estimated at 10,000,000 or 11,000,000. North of the Danube, 5,400,000 dwell in Rumania; 1,250,000 are settled in Transylvania, where they constitute a large majority of the population; and a still greater number are to be found in the Banat and other Hungarian districts west and north of Transylvania. Close upon 1,000,000 inhabit Bessarabia and the adjoining parts of South Russia, and about 230,000 are in the Austrian province of Bukovina. South of the Danube, about 500,000 are scattered over northern Greece and European Turkey, under the name of Kutzo-Vlachs, Tzintzars or Aromani. In Servia this element is preponderant in the Timok valley, while in Istria it is represented by the Cici, at present largely Slavonized, as are now entirely the kindred Morlachs of Dalmatia. Since, however, it is quite impossible to obtain exact statistics over so wide an area, and in countries where politics and racial feeling are so closely connected, the figures given above can only be regarded as approximately accurate; and some writers place the total of the Vlachs as low as 9,000,000. It is noteworthy that the Rumans north of the Danube continually gain ground at the expense of their neighbours; and even the long successful Greek propaganda among the Kutzo-Vlachs were checked after 1860 by the labours of Apostolu Margaritis and other nationalists.

A detailed account of the physical, mental and moral characteristics of the Vlachs, their modern civilization and their historical development, will be found under the headings Rumania and Macedonia.

All divisions of the race prefer to style themselves Romani, Romeni, Rumeni or Aromani; and it is from the native pronunciation of this name that we have the equivalent expression Ruman, a word which must by no means be confined to that part of the Vlach race inhabiting the present kingdom of Rumania.

The name " Vlachs," applied to the Rumans by their neighbours but never adopted by themselves, appears under many allied forms, the Sla y s saying Volokh or Woloch, the Its name. Greeks Vlachoi, the MagyarsOloh, and the Turks, at a later date, INok. In its origin identical with the English Wealh or Welsh, it represents a Slavonic adaptation of a generic term applied by the Teutonic races to all Roman provincials during the 4th and 5th centuries. The Sla y s, at least in their principal extent, first knew the Roman empire through a Teutonic medium, and adopted their term Volokh from the Ostro-Gothic equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon Wealh. It thus finds its analogies in the German name for Italy- Welschland (Wtilischland), in the Walloons of the Low Countries and the Wallgau of Tirol. An early instance of its application to the Roman population of the Eastern empire is found (c. 55 0 - 600) in the Traveller's Song, where, in a passage which in all probability connects itself with the early trade-route between the Baltic staple of Wollin and Byzantium, the gleeman speaks of Caesar's realm as Walaric, " Welshry." In verse 140 he speaks of the Rum-walas, and it is to be observed that Rum is one of the words by which the Vlachs of eastern Europe still know themselves.

The Vlachs claim to be a Latin race in the same sense as the Spaniards or Provencals - Latin by language and culture, and, in a smaller degree, by descent. Despite the long predominance of Greek, Slavonic and Turkish influence, there is no valid objection to this claim, which is now generally accepted by competent ethnologists. The language of the Vlachs is Latin in structure and to a great extent in vocabulary; their features and stature would not render them conspicuous as foreigners in south Italy; and that their ancestors were Roman provincials is attested not only by the names " Vlach " and "Ruman " but also by popular and literary tradition. In their customs and folk-lore both Latin and Slavonic traditions assert themselves. Of their Roman traditions the Trajansaga, the celebration of the Latin festivals of the Rosalia and Kalendae, the belief in the striga (witch), the names of the months and days of the week, may be taken as typical examples. Some Roman words connected with the Christian religion, like biserica (basilica)=a church, botez = baptizo, duminica = Sunday, preot (presbyter) =priest, point to a continuous tradition of the Illyrian church, though most of their ecclesiastical terms, like their liturgy and alphabet, were derived from the Slavonic. In most that concerns political organization the Slavonic element is also preponderant, though there are words like imparat = imperator, and domn=dominus, which point to the old stock. Many words relating to kinship are also Latin, some, like vitrig (vitricus) = father-in-law, being alone preserved by this branch of the Romance family. But if the Latin descent of the Vlachs may be regarded as proven, it is far less easy to determine their place of origin and to trace their early migrations.

The centre of gravity of the Vlach or Ruman race is at present unquestionably north of the Danube in the almost circular territory between the Danube, Theiss and Dniester; Its and corresponds roughly with the Roman province original of Dacia, formed by Trajan in A.D. 106. From this home. circumstance the popular idea has arisen that the race itself represents the descendants of the Romanized population of Trajan's Dacia, which was assumed to have maintained an unbroken existence in Walachia, Transylvania and the neighbour provinces, beneath the dominion of a succession of invaders. The Vlachs of Pindus, and the southern region generally, were, on this hypothesis, to be regarded as later immigrants from the lands north of the Danube. In 1871, E. R. Roesler published at Leipzig, in a collective form, a series of essays entitled Romdnische Studien, in which he absolutely denied the claim of the Rumanian and Transylvanian Vlachs to be regarded as autochthonous Dacians. He laid stress on the statements of Vopiscus and others as implying the total withdrawal of the Roman provincials from Trajan's Dacia by Aurelian, in A.D. 272, and on the non-mention by historians of a Latin population in the lands on the left bank of the lower Danube, during their successive occupation by Goths, Huns, Gepidae, Avars, Sla y s, Bulgars and other barbarian races. He found the first trace of a Ruman settlement north of the Danube in a Transylvanian diploma of 1222. Roesler's thesis has been generally regarded as an entirely new departure in critical ethnography. As a matter of fact, his conclusions had to a great extent been already anticipated by F. J. Sulzer in his Geschichte des Transalpinischen Daciens, published at Vienna in 1781, and at a still earlier date by the Dalmatian historian G. Lucio (Lucius of Trail) in his work De Regno Dalmatiae et Croatiae,Amsterdam, 1666. 1666.

The theory of the later immigration of the Rumans into their present abodes north of the Danube, as stated in its most extreme form by Roesler, commanded wide acceptance, and in Hungary it was politically utilized as a plea for refusing parity of treatment to a race of comparatively recent intruders. In Rumania itself Roesler's views were resented as an attack on Ruman nationality. Outside Rumania they found a determined opponent in Dr J. Jung, of Innsbruck, who upheld the continuity of the Roman provincial stock in Trajan's Dacia, disputing from historic analogies the total withdrawal of the provincials by Aurelian; and the reaction against Roesler was carried still farther by J. L. Pie, Professor A. D. Xenopol of Jassy, B. P. Hasdeu, D. Onciul and many other Rumanian writers, who maintain that, while their own race north of the Danube represents the original Daco-Roman population of this region, the Vlachs of Turkey and Greece are similarly descended from the Moeso-Roman and Illyro-Roman inhabitants of the provinces lying south of the river. On this theory the entire Vlach race occupies almost precisely the same territories to-day as in the 3rd century.

Its Latin character. On the whole it may be said that the truth lies between the two extremes. Roesler is no doubt so far right that after 272, and throughout the early middle ages, the bulk of the Ruman people lay south of the Danube. Pie's view that the population of the Roman provinces of Moesia and Illyria were Hellenized rather than Romanized, and that it is to Trajan's Dacia alone that we must look for the Roman source of the Vlach race, conflicts with what we know of the Latinizing of the Balkan lands from inscriptions, martyrologies, Procopius's list of Justinian's Illyrian fortresses and other sources. This Roman element south of the Danube had further received a great increase at the expense of Trajan's colonial foundation to the north when Aurelian established his New Dacia on the Moesian side of the river. On the other hand, the analogy supplied by the withdrawal of the Roman provincials from Riparian Noricum tells against the assumption that the official withdrawal of the Roman colonists of Trajan's Dacia by Aurelian entailed the entire evacuation of the Carpathian regions by their Latin-speaking inhabitants. As on the upper Danube the continuity of the Roman population is attested by the Vici Romanisci of early medieval diplomas and by other traces of a Romanic race still represented by the Ladines of the Tirol, so it is reasonable to suppose a Latin-speaking population continued to exist in the formerly thickly colonized area embracing the present Transylvania and Little Walachia, with adjoining Carpathian regions. Even as late as Justinian's time (483-565), the official connexion with the old Dacian province was not wholly lost, as is shown by the erection or restoration of certain fortified posts on the left bank of the lower Danube.

We may therefore assume that the Latin race of eastern Europe never wholly lost touch of its former trans-Danubian strongholds. It was, however, on any showing greatly migra- diminished there. The open country, the broad plains of what is now the Rumanian kingdom, and the Banat of Hungary were in barbarian occupation. The centre of gravity of the Roman or Romance element of Illyricum had now shifted south of the Danube. By the 6th century a large part of Thrace, Macedonia and even of Epirus had become Latin-speaking.

What had occurred in Trajan's Dacia in the 3rd century was consummated in the 6th and 7th throughout the greater part of the South-Illyrian provinces, and the Slavonic and Avar conquests severed the official connexion with eastern Rome. The Roman element was uprooted from its fixed seats, and swept hither and thither by the barbarian flood. Nomadism became an essential of independent existence, while large masses of homeless provincials were dragged as captives in the train of their conquerors, to be distributed in servile colonies. They were thus in many cases transported by barbarian chiefs - Slav, Avar and Bulgarian - to trans-Danubian and Pannonian regions. In the Acts of St Demetrius of Thessalonica (d. A.D. 306) we find an account of such a Roman colony, which, having been carried away from South-Illyrian cities by the Avar khagan (prince), and settled by him in the Sirmian district beyond the Save, revolted after seventy years of captivity, made their way once more across the Balkan passes, and finally settled as an independent community in the country inland from Salonica. Others, no doubt, thus transported northwards never returned. The earliest Hungarian historians who describe the Magyar invasion of the 9th century speak of the old inhabitants of the country as Romans, and of the country they occupied as Pascua Romanorum; and the Russian Nestor, writing about 1 i oo, makes the same invaders fight against Sla y s and Vlachs in the Carpathian Mountains. So far from the first mention of the Vlachs north of the Danube occurring only in 1222, as Roesler asserts, it appears from a passage of Nicetas of Chonae that they were to be found already in 1164 as far afield as the borders of Galicia; and the date of a passage in the Nibelungenlied, which mentions the Vlachs, under their leader Ramunc, in association with the Poles, cannot well be later than 1200.

Nevertheless, throughout the early middle ages the bulk of the Ruman population lay south of the Danube. It was in the Balkan lands that the Ruman race and language took their characteristic mould. It is here that this new Illyrian Romance first rises into historic prominence. Already in the 6th century, as we learn from the place-names, such as Sceptecasas, Burgualtu, Clisura, &c., given by Procopius, the Ruman language was assuming, so far as its Latin elements were concerned, its typical form. In the somewhat later campaigns of Cornmentiolus (587) and Priscus, against the Avars and Sla y s, we find the Latin-speaking soldiery of the Eastern emperor making use of such Romance expressions as torna frate! (turn, brother!), or sculca (out of bed) applied to a watch (cf. Ruman a se culca=Italian coricarsi+ex-(s-) privative). Next we find this warlike Ruman population largely incorporated in the Bulgarian kingdom, and, if we are to judge from the names Paganus and Sabinus, already supplying it with rulers in the 8th century. The blending and close contact during this period of the surviving Latin population with the Slavonic settlers of the peninsula impregnated the language with its large Slavonic ingredient. The presence of an important Latin element in Albanian, the frequent occurrence of Albanian words in Rumanian, and the remarkable retention by both languages of a suffix article, may perhaps imply that both alike took their characteristic shapes in the same region. The fact that these peculiarities are common to the Rumans north of the Danube, whose language differs dialectically from that of their southern brothers, shows that it was this southern branch that throughout the early periods of Ruman history was exercising a dominating influence. Migrations, violent transplantation, the intercourse which was kept up between the most outlying members of the race, in its very origin nomadic, at a later period actual colonization and the political influence of the Bulgaro-Vlachian empire, no doubt contributed to propagate these southern linguistic acquisitions throughout that northern area to which the Ruman race was destined almost imperceptibly to shift its centre of gravity.

Byzantium, which had ceased to be Roman, and had become Romanic, renewed its acquaintance with the descendants of the Latin provincials of Illyricum through a Slavonic medium, and applied to them the name of Vlach, which the Slav himself had borrowed from the Goth. The first mention of Vlachs in a Byzantine source is about the year 976, when Cedrenus (ii. 439) relates the murder of the Bulgarian tsar Samuel's brother " by certain Vlach wayfarers," at a spot called the Fair Oaks, between Castoria and Prespa. From this period onwards the Ruman inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula are constantly mentioned by this name, and we find a series of political organizations and territorial divisions connected with the name of Vlachia. A short synopsis may be given of the most important of these, outside the limits of Rumania itself.

1. The Bulgaro-Vlach Empire. - After the overthrow of the older Bulgarian tsardom by Basil Bulgaroktonos (976-1025), the Vlach population of Thrace, Haemus and the Moesian lands passed once more under Byzantine dominion; and in 1185 a heavy tax, levied in kind on the cattle of these warlike mountain shepherds, stirred the Vlachs to revolt against the emperor Isaac Angelus, and under the leadership of two brothers, Peter and Asen, to found a new BulgaroVlachian empire, which ended with Kaliman II. in 1257. The dominions of these half-Slavonic half-Ruman emperors extended north of the Danube over a great deal of what is now Rumania, and it was during this period that the Vlach population north of the river seems to have been most largely reinforced. The 13thcentury French traveller Rubruquis speaks of all the country between Don and Danube as Asen's land or Blakia.

2. Great Walachia (Μεγάλη Βλαχία). - It is from Anna Comnena, in the second half of the 11th century, that we first hear of a Vlach settlement, the nucleus of which was the mountainous region of Thessaly. Benjamin of Tudela, in the succeeding century, gives an interesting account of this Great Walachia, then completely independent. It embraced the southern and central ranges of Pindus, and extended over part of Macedonia, thus including the region in which the Roman settlers mentioned in the Acts of St Demetrius had fixed their abode. After the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, Great Walachia was included in the enlarged despotate of Epirus, but it soon reappears as an independent principality under its old name, which, after passing under the yoke of the Serb emperor Dushan, was finally conquered by the Turks in 1393. Many of their old privileges were accorded to the inhabitants, and their taxes were limited to an annual tribute. Since this period the Megalovlachites have been largely Hellenized, but they are still represented by the flourishing Tzintzar settlements of Pindus and its neighbourhood (see Macedonia).

3. Little Walachia (Μικρή Βλαχία)was a name applied by Byzantine writers to the Ruman settlements of Aetolia and Acarnania, and with it may be included " Upper Walachia," or Άνω Βλαχία. Its inhabitants are still represented by the Tzintzars of the Aspropotamo and the Karaguni (Black Capes) of Acarnania.

4. The Morlachs (Mavrovlachi) of the West. - These are already mentioned as Nigri Latini by the presbyter of Dioclea (c. "50) in the old Dalmatian littoral and the mountains of what is now Montenegro, Herzegovina and North Albania. Other colonies extended through a great part of the old Servian interior, where is a region still called Stara Vlaska or " Old Walachia." The great commercial staple of the east Adriatic shores, the republic of Ragusa, seems in its origin to have been a Ruman settlement, and many Vlach traces survived in its later dialect. Philippus de Diversis, who described the city as it existed in 1440, says that " the various officers of the republic do not make use either of Slav or Italian, with which they converse with strangers, but a certain other dialect only partially intelligible to us Latins," and cites words with strong Ruman affinities. In the mountains above Ragusa a number of Vlach tribes are mentioned in the archives of that city, and the original relationship of the Ragusans and the nomadic Alpine representatives of the Roman provincials, who preserved a traditional knowledge of the old lines of communication throughout the peninsula, explains the extraordinary development of the Ragusan commerce. In the 14th century the Mavrovlachi or Morlachs extended themselves towards the Croatian borders, and a large part of maritime Croatia and northern Dalmatia began to be known as Morlacchia. A Major Vlachia was formed about the triple frontier of Bosnia, Croatia and Dalmatia, and a " Little Walachia " as far north as Pozega. The Morlachs have now become Slavonized (see Dalmatia).

5. Cici of Istria. - The extreme Ruman offshoot to the north-west is still represented by the Cici of the Val d'Arsa and adjoining Istrian districts. They represent a 15th-century Morlach colony from the Isles of Veglia, and had formerly a wider extension to Trieste and the counties of Gradisca and Gorz. The Cici have almost entirely abandoned their native tongue, which is the last remaining representative of the old Morlach, and forms a connecting link between the Daco-Roman (or Rumanian) and the Illyroor Macedo-Roman dialects.

6. Rumans of Transylvania and Hungary. - As already stated, a large part of the Hungarian plains were, at the coming of the Magyars in the 9th century, known as Pascua Romanorum. At a later period privileged Ruman communities existed at Fogaras, where was a Silva Vlachorum, at Marmaros, Deva, Hatzeg, Hunyad and Lugos, and in the Banat were seven Ruman districts. Two of the greatest figures in Hungarian history, the 15th-century rulers John Corvinus of Hunyad and his son King Matthias, were due to this element. For its later history see Transylvania.

Sunday, 17 September 2006

The Assembly draws attention to the critical situation of the Aromanian language and culture. These have been present in the Balkans for over 2000 years, but face today a serious risk of extinction.

To prevent such a cultural loss for Europe as a whole, the Assembly would encourage the Balkan states, where the Aromanians live, to support their language in the fields of education, religion and the media. In particular the European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages should be implemented. Other member states and the Council for Cultural Co-operation are also called upon for assistance.

1.The Assembly is concerned about the critical situation of the Aromanian culture and language, which have existed for over two thousand years in the Balkan peninsula.

2.Whereas there were over 500 000 Aromanian speakers at the beginning of the twentieth century, there are now only about half that number, dispersed through Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" and Serbia, which are their home countries, as well as Romania, Germany, the United States of America and Australia. Most of them are elderly. Aromanian, as a minority language, is under threat.

3.The scale of the problem has become evident since the extension of cultural co-operation to the Balkans, the home of Aromanian.

4.The Aromanian language and culture are facing a similar fate to that of many European cultures which are becoming or have become extinct. However, the acceptance of a pluralist system of cultural values is a prerequisite for stability in Europe, and particularly in the Balkans.

5.The Aromanians make no political demands, but merely want assistance in safeguarding their language and culture, which seem doomed to extinction unless the European institutions, and the Council of Europe in particular, come to their aid.

6.The Assembly recalls the texts which it has adopted on related matters, notably Recommendation 928 (1981) on the educational and cultural problems of minority languages and dialects in Europe, Recommendation 1283 (1996) on history and the learning of history in Europe, and Recommendation 1291 (1996) on Yiddish culture.

7.The latter text recommended setting up, under the auspices of the Council of Europe, a "laboratory for dispersed ethnic minorities" with a mandate, inter alia, to promote the survival of minority cultures or their memory, carry out surveys of persons still speaking minority languages, record, collect and preserve their monuments and evidence of their language and folklore, publish basic documents and promote legislation to protect minority cultures against discrimination or annihilation.

8.The Assembly recommends that the Committee of Ministers:

i.encourage Balkan states which comprise Aromanian communities to sign, ratify and implement the European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages and invite them to support the Aromanians, particularly in the following fields:

education in their mother tongue,

religious services in Aromanian in their churches,

newspapers, magazines and radio and television programmes in Aromanian,

support for their cultural associations;

ii.invite the other member states to support the Aromanian language, for instance by creating university professorships in the subject and disseminating the most interesting products of Aromanian culture throughout Europe by means of translations, anthologies, courses, exhibitions and theatrical productions;

iii.introduce fellowships for artists and writers from Aromanian minority groups throughout the Balkans, so that they can engage in appropriate creative work in the fields of Aromanian language and culture;

iv.request the Council for Cultural Co-operation to ensure co-ordination of the activities of Aromanian academic centres throughout Europe;

v.invite the education ministers of member states to include the history of Aromanian in European history books;

vi.seek to establish co-operation and partnership with organisations, foundations and other interested bodies in the private sector with a view to implementing these recommendations;

vii.take account of Aromanian culture in its follow-up to Recommendation 1291 (1996), particularly where the "laboratory for dispersed ethnic minorities" is concerned.

II. Explanatory memorandumby Mr Lluis Maria de PUIG

Foreword

The aim of this report is to draw the Assembly's attention to the impending threats to a people which, although little known, is an integral part of the patchwork of European cultures. This people, on whose origins there is some disagreement among specialists, has been living in the Balkans for two thousand years. It has never had an independent state and has often been a minority in its states of residence. Throughout its history it has apparently maintained good neighbourly relations with the peoples alongside which it has lived and is still living. Despite a certain tendency to integrate (it has almost completely merged with the host population in the north-western Balkans), this people has managed to remain linguistically and culturally homogeneous. However, it does not constitute a "community" in the sense of an organised group, and it is only since the political upheavals of the last few years in virtually all the countries inhabited by Aromanians that local, regional and national cultural associations have emerged and a number of international contacts developed.

The Aromanians are a very exceptional, indeed unique historical, linguistic and cultural phenomenon. And yet this highly original culture is at risk and the Aromanian language is doomed to extinction unless the European institutions, especially the Council of Europe, come to its aid. In fact, it would be unthinkable to remain inert and watch such a rich language and culture disappear. In contrast to other minority groups, the Aromanians make no political demands; all they want is assistance in protecting their language and culture, which form part of the European cultural heritage.

Introduction

In May 1994, Mr Ferrarini and others, including myself, presented a motion for an order on the Aromanian community. The Bureau of the Assembly referred this motion to the Committee on Culture and Education for a report and to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights and the Committee on Relations with European Non-Member Countries for an opinion.

As soon as I was appointed rapporteur, I began to collect documentation on the matter and made contact with several representatives of the Aromanian communities in Europe and the United States of America. I made plans on several occasions to visit eastern Europe in order to meet Aromanians in their ancestral villages, and finally visited Veria in May 1996 to meet members of the Vlach Association. In September I briefly attended the Colloquy on Aromanian Language and Culture at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau.

In September 1995 I had sent a questionnaire on the status and cultural rights of Aromanians to the competent authorities in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" and Romania, through the intermediary of their respective parliamentary delegations. I wanted to ascertain how the Aromanians are seen by the authorities of their countries of residence. However, only "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" and Romania replied. The same questionnaire was sent to the Union for the Aromanian Language and Culture (Freiburg) for distribution to the various Aromanian associations. I received ten replies from both associations and individuals on the situation of Aromanians in Albania, Greece, "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" and Romania. Professor Max Peyfus of the Viennese Institute for Eastern and Southern European Studies and Professor Hans-Martin Gauger, specialist in Romance languages at Freiburg University, whom I would like to thank, sent us their comments on the successive versions of the preliminary draft report. I would also like to thank my Greek colleague Mr Aristotelis Pavlidis for all the information which he has given me and which I have naturally taken into account.

This report is based on the replies to the questionnaire, the material supplied by various Aromanian associations, the information supplied by the permanent delegations to the Council of Europe of Bulgaria, Greece, "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" and Romania and consultation of an extensive bibliography on the Aromanians, their history, language and culture, as well as a number of more general works on the history and languages of the Balkans. I will devote the first section to a brief historical overview, and then examine the current situation and the problems encountered by the Aromanian authorities in the various countries in which they have been living for two thousand years.

Origins and history of the Aromanian people

The Macedo-Romanians and Vlachs, who are sometimes called Mavro-Vlachs, Kutzo-Vlachs or Tsintsars and who call themselves Aromanians, are related to the Romanians living on the left bank of the Danube. Their language, Macedo-Romanian, belongs to the Romanian branch of the Romance languages, as do Daco-Romanian (spoken in Romania), Megleno-Romanian (still spoken in a number of villages in the Gevgelija area on the border between "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" and Greece) and Istro-Romanian (now virtually extinct). The earliest Aromanian text was found in Albania and dates from 1731, and therefore the documented history of the Aromanians begins only in the eighteenth century, even though there are several earlier historical references to the "Vlachs", a word which stems from the general name given by the earliest Slavs to peoples speaking Latin (or a Latinised language).

Opinions diverge on the origins of the Vlachs. It is, however, likely that they originated in the Roman colonisation of the Balkans, which began in the third century B.C. According to some historians the Aromanians are the descendants of Latinised Illyrian peoples and Roman legionaries who had settled in the Balkans following the conquest of Macedonia by Paulus-Emilius in 168 B.C. On the other hand, the Greeks consider them to be Latinised Greeks,(2) the Bulgarians say that they descend from the Thracians, while the Romanians identify their origins in a branch of Romanised Dacians. Comparative linguistic studies show that Aromanian has a similar structure to Albanian, the only surviving Illyrian language, which lends some credence to the first hypothesis.(3) The fact that the Roman colonisation of Macedonia began earlier and lasted longer than that of Dacia would suggest that the Aromanians preceded the Romanians in Balkan history.

During the Roman occupation the Vlach language was intensively influenced by Latin. In the early Middle Ages, during the great Slav invasions of the Balkans, the Aromanian populations were dispersed, the only survivors being those who fled to the mountains to preserve their language and culture.

The Aromanians make their first appearance in history in the tenth century, when they were mostly spread over the mountain areas of the Balkan peninsula, from Istria to Greece and from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, though they broke down into two major groups: one along Mount Haemus and the other in northern Greece, Thessaly and southern Macedonia, but especially in the Pindus massif (see appendix). According to their contemporaries, the Vlachs' main activity was pasturage, but they also engaged in trade, which explains their presence throughout the Balkans.

Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish Jew who travelled through south-eastern Europe and the Middle East between 1159 and 1173, alludes to the Vlachs in The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela. He claimed that they enjoyed some measure of independence on their Valachian mountain tops.(4) Historians, notably in Bulgaria, agree that the Vlach mountain-dwellers played a major role in the insurrection led by the brothers Theodore-Peter and John-Arsenius (probably of Bulgaro-Cuman origin) against Byzantium in 1186; this uprising led to the creation of the so-called "Second Kingdom of Bulgaria".(5)

The Ottoman conquest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries scarcely changed the Aromanians' situation, as they enjoyed some degree of religious and cultural autonomy within the Orthodox Christian millet.(6) According to Pouqueville, Napoleon Bonaparte's Consul to Ali Pasha of Janina, the ruler of Epirus, the Vlachs enjoyed a special status and only paid a modest tribute to the Grand Sultan's mother. Other historians confirm that the Vlachs did indeed enjoy this privileged position. For instance, N. Malcolm points out that they were formally exempted from the law prohibiting non-Muslims from carrying weapons.(7)

The Ottomans realised that the Vlachs' mobility and strong military tradition could be of use to them; they allowed them to maintain a national militia, whose members were called armatoles and their leaders capitani. By means of special fiscal measures and permission to pillage enemy territory, this militia was used to guard the border between the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires. It is interesting to note that the Hapsburgs had the same idea and used the Vlachs who had been driven north by the advancing Ottomans against their brethren south of the border.

The Aromanians' Orthodox religion was one of the factors which assigned them a major role in the various wars and revolutions that culminated in the creation of the states which they now inhabit. The Greek patriotic association "Hetaeria" launched an uprising in 1821, and, after intervention by Russia, Britain and France, this led to the creation of the Greek state in 1830 and its independence in 1835.

Many illustrious names of Aromanian origin are to be found among the protagonists of the revolution and the outstanding figures in Greek culture and political life. Three examples are Baron George Sina, Marshal Constantin Smolensky, Patriarch Athenagoras and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Averoff. This is explained by the fact that many Aromanians were won over to Hellenic culture under the influence of the Greek school and church, because at the time the only nationality in Turkey entitled to maintain national schools, churches and cultural institutions were the Greeks. Taking advantage of the privileges granted to the Christians by the earliest Sultans, the Patriarchs of Constantinople _ all of whom were of Greek origin _ had become the ecclesiastical and civil leaders of all the Orthodox populations of the Empire. In fact, the Turks referred to all these peoples by the collective name of Rum, designating Christians (of the Eastern Roman Empire).

After independence, many Balkan countries adopted a policy of setting up national schools and granting independence to their churches. This trend was a token of their national emancipation and marked the development of the Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Serb societies during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Macedo-Romanians experienced several movements of national reawakening from the eighteenth century onwards. This trend was centred in Moscopolis, the famous cultural centre of the Albanian Aromanians (now called Voskopoje). This liberation movement resumed in 1862 with the setting up of the first Macedo-Romanian school in Macedonia. At the same time, the Aromanian colony in Bucharest founded the Macedo-Romanian Intellectual Cultural Society, which worked to strengthen the movement among the other Aromanian communities in the Balkans.

Around this time Romania began to take a greater interest in the Aromanians' cause. Furthermore, the Turkish authorities were taking steps to promote the Aromanian national cultural movement. An order issued by the Vizier in 1878 gave Vlachs the right to be taught in their own language and afforded assistance and protection to their teachers. In 1888 the Macedo-Romanians obtained an imperial firman granting them the right to set up national churches. In 1908 Aromanian members were admitted to the Turkish Parliament.

The Berlin Treaty of 1878 also recognised the existence of the Macedo-Romanians as a separate nation, and placed them on the same level as the other nationalities in the Ottoman Empire. Under this treaty Thessaly and part of Epirus were annexed to Greece; the new borders thus split the Aromanian population of the Pindus in two. The Aromanians protested to the representatives of the great powers against this division, but in vain.

In the twentieth century, the regions inhabited by the Macedo-Romanians were again divided up among the various states in the region. Following the Balkan wars and the subsequent conflicts, sizeable groups of Aromanians were spread out around Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Turkey and Albania.

After the re-drawing of the borders between Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia under the Bucharest Peace Treaty of 1913, the Aromanians proposed incorporating their main groups _ in the Pindus mountains and the regions between Gramos and Bitola _ into the future state of Albania in the form of an autonomous province. Greece put forward the alternative of absorbing the Pindus region into their own territory, undertaking to safeguard its inhabitants' specific national identity. This proposal was accepted, but it did not settle the Macedo-Romanian question. The fact that the Macedo-Romanians were not recognised as a minority at the time prepared the ground for future problems and conflicts. In 1918, Macedo-Romanian schools in Serbia were closed. During the 1920s the same fate befell many schools in Greece, and in 1938 all the Macedo-Romanian schools in Albania were closed. Finally, the last remaining Aromanian schools in Greece were shut down between 1945 and 1948.

Between the two world wars, Romania negotiated the setting up of Romanian-language schools with the other countries hosting Aromanian populations. However, this policy, which was intended as positive support for the Aromanians, had two negative effects: firstly, the Aromanians began to suspect Romania of attempting to assimilate them, and secondly, it also prompted suspicion on the part of the Aromanians' countries of residence, which began to regard them as Romanians (ie foreigners) rather than Aromanians (and therefore nationals).

The current position of the Aromanian community

It is virtually impossible to ascertain the exact number of Aromanians currently living in the Balkan countries. Some states exclude them from censuses and the official figures on them in other countries are disputed. At the same time, there are sizeable communities in Romania, Germany, France, the United States of America and Australia.

The Union for the Aromanian Culture and Language and the Association of French Aromanians estimate that some 1 500 000 Aromanians are currently citizens of various states throughout the Balkans: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia". Nevertheless, this is most likely an overestimation.

During the Peace Conference in Versailles after the first world war, the Macedo-Romanian delegation, with which most of the participants had agreed to hold talks, issued a communiqué presenting estimates of the various Aromanian populations: the Pindus region (which wanted complete independence): 130 000 inhabitants; Bitola (Monastir): 83 145; Musakia-Corytza: 77 814; Saloniki: 103 877; and Thessaly: 81 520 inhabitants (total population: some 500 000).

Professor Peyfus of the University of Vienna estimates the number of Aromanians who use their mother tongue at 250 000 (in 1996). Greece apparently has the largest numbers of such persons, followed by Romanian, Albania, "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" and, lastly, Bulgaria.

The situation of the Aromanian community varies from country to country. It should be stressed that the Aromanians are full Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Yugoslav or Romanian citizens. They are fluent in the various languages spoken in their countries and are integrated into their national societies. I therefore think it would be ludicrous to consider them as any kind of threat to their countries, which, on the contrary, they enrich culturally.

The Aromanians limit their demands to recognition of their cultural rights, particularly the right to learn and use their language. They listed these rights in the resolution which they adopted at the international conferences held in Mannheim University (September 1985) and Freiburg University (September 1988 and July 1993), and at the six regional conferences held in the United States of America. These rights are also set out in an appeal addressed to the Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Balkan States, which took place in Belgrade in February 1988. National conferences have also been held in Albania and "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia".

I will now summarise the situation of the Aromanians in their five countries of origin, that is to say Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, "the former Yugoslav Republic of

Macedonia" and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), as well as in Romania, since this country has special links with the Aromanians.

Albania

The Association of French Aromanians estimates that 15% of the Albanian population is Aromanian. According to the Aromanian Women's Foundation of Albania, the country's population comprises between 150 000 and 200 000 Aromanians. Other estimates vary between 100 000 and 300 000-400 000. In 1995 T.J. Winnifrith wrote that there were "about 50 000 persons who speak the Aromanian language and consider themselves as Aromanians".(8) There are no official statistics as the Aromanians are usually included in the "Greek Orthodox minority" because of their religion. They are concentrated in the south of the country, especially in Korçë, Lushnjë, Përmet, Gjirokastër, Sarandë, Berat, Durrës, Kavajë and Tiranë.

Albania has not yet finalised the status of the Macedo-Romanians. They are fighting for recognition as a national minority, not a cultural association or an "Albanian folk community, which is how they are considered today".(9)

There is absolutely no Aromanian-language teaching, press, radio or television in Albania. However, the President of the Aromanian Women's Foundation tells us that there is a church in the town of Korçë which holds religious services in Aromanian. A cultural society called "The Aromanians of Albania" was apparently set up in 1992.

Bulgaria

In Bulgaria, the Aromanian communities have associations in Peshtera, Velingrad, Dupnitsa, Rakitovo and Blagoevgrad, etc. These associations maintain contact with Aromanian communities in other countries. According to the Sofia Aromanian Society, which co-ordinates the activities of the Bulgarian Vlach Association, a distinction must be drawn between the Aromanian Vlachs (2 000 to 3 000, living mainly in the south of the country) and the Romanian Vlachs (20 000 to 30 000, living in the north). Most of the Sofia Aromanians are the descendants of families which emigrated from Macedonia and northern Greece between 1850 and 1914.

The headquarters of the Sofia Aromanian Society, the Church of the Holy Trinity and the Romanian Cultural Institute were built on lands purchased by the Aromanian community (with the help of the Romanian State) at the end of last century. The Romanian Cultural Institute initiated Balkan, Slav and Bulgarian cultural and historical research. Teaching was mainly in Romanian, though Bulgarian language and literature were part of the compulsory curriculum. Latin, Ancient Greek, French and Russian were also compulsory, while German, Italian and English were optional. The Institute closed down in 1948 "owing to a misunderstanding", in the words of Mr Kurkchiev, President of the Bulgarian Vlach Association.

After the political changes in Bulgaria, the Aromanians requested the reopening of the institute and its school, but have so far had no reply. This is their only demand, as otherwise they maintain good relations with Bulgaria and the Bulgarian authorities.

The Romanian Church of the Holy Trinity has never ceased its activities since the beginning of the century, and a Romanian priest dispatched by the Orthodox Patriarchate of Romania conducts services in Romanian.

Greece

The Greek authorities do not recognise Aromanians as a different ethnic group, considering them rather as "Vlach- (or Latin-) speaking Greeks". The Permanent Representative of Greece with the Council of Europe informs us that the Aromanians "are an integral part of the Greek population and have a purely Greek ethnic awareness. Their customs are completely Greek, they speak and write the national language without difficulty, they have never lost the feeling of ethnic belonging to Greece, have never identified with any extraneous element, and have never aspired to identification as a separate national entity. Many members of this group are eminent representatives of the Greek nation in the fields of literature, the arts, sciences and politics".

The Barcelona-based Catalan Socio-linguistic Institute estimates that there are in the region of 200 000 Aromanians in Greece, while the Association of French Aromanians suggests a figure of between 600 000 and 700 000. Other sources have produced an estimate of as much as 1 million, or even 1,2 million, (only half of whom still speak the language), whereas the official figures, based on the 1951 census, mention 25 000 "Vlach-speaking Greeks". The authorities consider that this number has since "significantly decreased". However, it is difficult to imagine that such a small group could produce so many "eminent representatives of the Greek nation in the fields of literature, the arts, sciences and polities". The Greek Government's official reply to my questionnaire acknowledges that some Greeks "use the Greek language as their main language but, when they meet in small groups in certain isolated communities, use, alongside Greek, an "idiom" (not even a dialect) which comprises words of both Latin and Greek origin". Further on in the same paragraph we read that these same Greeks (the Aromanians) contributed "extremely usefully to the creation of the new Greek state, of which they are one of the most active components in all fields".

The Aromanians are concentrated in the Pindus mountains, Epirus, Thessaly and Macedonia. Many Aromanians fled the fighting during the Greek civil war and more recently, the economic decline in their areas, taking refuge in the major cities (Athens and Thessaloniki). The two Aromanian villages which I visited in the mountains above Veria (Selia de Sus and Kato Vermio, or Selia de Jos) are only inhabited at weekends and during the summer.

In accordance with the Lausanne Peace Treaty (1923), the Greek Constitution guaranteed the rights of the religious minorities settled within the Greek territory. However, since their religion is Greek Orthodox, these guarantees do not apply to them.

Greece accepted Romanian schools within its territory until 1948, when Romania stopped subsidising them. The Aromanian language disappeared from all educational levels until recently, when an Aromanian course was introduced at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. Nor is Aromanian used in the judicial and administrative fields or the media, apart from the occasional showing of folk dances and songs on television and radio.

The official Greek reply to the questionnaire also states that "Greece has a Pan-Hellenic Union of Vlach Cultural Associations, which was set up in 1985 and comprises some forty local associations, which conduct a wide range of cultural activities in several different fields".

"The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia"

According to official statistics (for 1994),(10)there are only 8 467 Vlachs in "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", concentrated in the regions of Skopje, Stip, Bitola, Krusevo and Struga, but the Aromanian associations dispute this figure, "which should be 10 or 12 times greater". Some Aromanians also live in Ohrid, Kocani-Vinica, Sveti Nikole, Kumanovo and Gevgelija.

According to a 1994 report by the British Helsinki Human Rights Groups, the figure emerging from the census refers to the number of persons who still use the Aromanian language and who consider themselves first and foremost as Aromanians. However, many Vlach families which have been more or less assimilated linguistically into the majority population are still proud of their origins. Such persons, who consider themselves as Vlachs, had apparently declared themselves to be "Macedonian" in the official context of the census. This being the case, the total number of Aromanians in "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" would probably just exceed 100 000,(11)a figure akin to the associations' estimates.

The 1991 Constitution officially recognises the Vlachs as a national minority. The Macedonian language must be used in contacts with government departments, but members of minorities can use their mother tongues in court. Under Macedonian law, the choice of name is a personal right. The data printed on identity cards is in the Macedonian language, using the Cyrillic alphabet, but the names of members of national minorities are written in the corresponding languages and alphabets alongside the official language. Despite these provisions the Aromanians complain that they "cannot revert to their Macedo-Romanian names as they were all Slavicised eighty years ago".

Consideration is being given to introducing the Vlach language as an optional primary school subject, and 346 pupils have already expressed interest. In 1995-96, optional one-hour weekly lessons in Aromanian were introduced into state schools.

A Vlach-language newspaper, Phoenix, was launched in 1992, but it collapsed after running into financial difficulties. There is a weekly thirty-minute television programme in the Vlach language, and Radio Skopje broadcasts a thirty-minute programme every day. Local radio stations in Stip, Krusevo, Struga and Ohrid also have weekly programmes in the Aromanian language, and Radio Gevgelija broadcasts half-an-hour per week in the Megleno-Romanian language.

The Macedonian Constitution grants Vlachs the same rights as the members of other nationalities, and the Vlach minority has two representatives on the Macedonian Parliament's Council for Inter-Ethnic Relations.

It is on the basis of these rights that the Aromanians are seeking restitution of the buildings formerly used as national schools, such as the Bitola grammar school. They are also demanding more air time for Aromanian on radio and television, as well as State subsidies for their newspaper.

At the same time the Aromanian community of Ohrid is attempting to set up one of the three bishoprics which they were promised in 1913 under the Bucharest Treaty. Activists are hoping that the Bishopric of Ohrid, subservient to the Patriarchate of Bucharest, will provide religious assistance for all Aromanians in their mother tongue.

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)

According to the Society of Aromanians in Belgrade, 15 000 inhabitants of Serbia-Montenegro declare themselves to be Aromanian. The majority of these live in Belgrade and the rest mainly in eastern Serbia, that is Vojvodina and Kosovo.

They have no special status and apparently do not want such a status. However, they can use their surnames and forenames in the Aromanian language.

The Belgrade Society of Aromanians publishes a newsletter and organises regular meetings and conferences. The authorities have provided the Society with a meeting room and are paying for its insurance policy. They have also provided financial assistance for publishing a book.

Serbian Aromanians co-operate with other associations abroad and the authorities in no way obstruct their activities. The Society's President and Secretary have also informed us that radio and television programmes are regularly broadcast on the Aromanian community.

According to a representative of the "Yugoslav Vlach and Romanian Movement", there are a 200 000-strong Vlach community in north-eastern Serbia, on the right bank of the Danube between the rivers Morava and Timok, and a 40 000-strong Romanian community in the Banat (Vojvodina region). The Union for the Aromanian Language and Culture informs us that the Timok Vlachs speak Daco-Romanian, which means that they are Romanians rather than Aromanians. Professor Hans-Martin Gauger, specialist in Romance languages at Freiburg University, and Professor Peyfus confirm this view.

Romania

According to the World Union of Aromanian Women (UFAP), the current population of Aromanians who emigrated to Romania from other Balkan countries between the two world wars is between 150 000 and 200 000. The figure is 150 000 according to the President of the Aromanian Youth Foundation "Valahia", 70 000 according to the Romanian parliamentary delegation and the President of the Bucharest-based Macedo-Romanian Cultural Association, and only 28 000 according to the Romanian authorities, who, strangely enough, draw a distinction between Aromanians (21 000) and Macedo-Romanians (7 000).(12)

The Aromanian community is concentrated in south-eastern Romania, particularly Dobrudja (75%), but also in major cities such as Bucharest and Constanta and various other parts of the country.

The Romanian Constitution secures the cultural rights of minorities, but as the Aromanians are related to the Romanians they are considered as a "linguistic and cultural community" rather than as a minority.

None of the educational levels comprises teaching in the Aromanian language, but the parliamentary delegation has pointed out that a structure is currently being set up.

The Romanian Ministry of Cultural Affairs publishes a monthly magazine, Desteptarea Aromânilor, but only 25% of the content is in Aromanian. There are Aromanian newspapers and radio programmes, but very few TV programmes. Associations organise a number of cultural and folk events, although they receive no support from the authorities.

Conclusion

The traditional Aromanian lifestyle (including isolation from the other Balkan communities, a very high rate of endogamy, and an emphasis on rural economic activities) was completely disrupted at the beginning of this century by the political and social changes in the Balkans. When their territory was divided up among four different States and the borders were made permanent, the different Aromanian communities found themselves unable to conduct their traditional exchanges. More often than not, their herds and lands were sold, and many Aromanians left their mountainsides to settle in the towns and cities and thus merge with the mass. Compulsory education (in the majority language) and the advent of broadcasting served only to expedite this process.

As a result, the Aromanian language and culture, which had survived for 2 000 years in the Balkan mountains, are today threatened with extinction. The Council of Europe must do its utmost to prevent this risk, by demanding that all states which comprise Aromanian communities respect their cultural rights. This should be facilitated by the fact that all these states (apart from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)) are now full members of our Organisation.

The Aromanians only want official recognition as a national minority and support from the authorities of the states in which they live, particularly in the following fields:

tongue teaching;

services in Aromanian in their churches;

newspapers, magazines and radio and television programmes in Aromanian;

support for their cultural associations.

This being the case, the Council of Europe should scrutinise the problems of this Balkan people and, in co-operation with their states of residence, help them preserve their language and culture, which are an integral part of the European heritage.

The Balkan states which comprise Aromanian communities should be encouraged to sign, ratify and implement the European Charter of Regional and Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (which would not imply automatic recognition of the Aromanians as a national minority). Every state signatory to the charter can choose which of the many measures proposed it wishes to apply to the regional or minority languages spoken within its territory. Even if each state concerned only chose the minimum level of protection for the Aromanian language, this would probably be enough to prevent its extinction.

Other Council of Europe member states should consider the possibility of creating university professorships for the Aromanian language and culture.

The European organisations might consider the possibility of supporting historic research into the Aromanian culture.

In its Recommendation 1291 (1996) on Yiddish culture, the Assembly recommended that the Committee of Ministers set up, under the auspices of the Council of Europe, a "laboratory for dispersed ethnic minorities" with a mandate, inter alia:

to promote the survival of minority cultures or their memory;

to carry out surveys of persons still speaking minority languages;

to record, collect and preserve their monuments and evidence of their language and folklore;

to publish basic documents;

to promote legislation to protect minority cultures against discrimination or annihilation.

Such a laboratory or observatory for dispersed ethnic minorities, equipped with modern academic resources, would be the ideal mechanism within the Council of Europe for safeguarding Aromanian language and culture.

Bibliography

Lazarou, A. G., Vlacks in Greece and the European Union (Athens, 1995).

Malcolm, N., Bosnia _ A Short History (London, 1994).

Fernandez-Arnesto, F. (Ed.), The Times Guide to the Peoples of Europe (London, 1994).

British Helsinki Human Rights Group, Macedonian Minorities: the Slav Macedonians of Northern Greece and the Treatment of Minorities in the Republic of Macedonia (Oxford, 1994).

[9] As pointed out by the Union for the Aromanian Language and Culture in its "Appeal to the Council of Europe and the European Parliament" of 4 October 1994.

[10] From the census carried out with the assistance of the Council of Europe.

[11] Macedonian Minorities: the Slav Macedonians of Northern Greece and the Treatment of Minorities in the Republic of Macedonia, a report issued by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, Oxford, 1994.

[12] White paper on the rights of persons belonging to national, ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities in Romania, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, June 1992.